


The Distant Sky

by fallintosanity (yopumpkinhead)



Category: Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells, Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 13:13:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 40,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16765846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead/pseuds/fallintosanity
Summary: Moon is supposed to be avoiding Consolation, but a mishap during a visit to Opal Night puts Consolation in danger. Moon and Malachite have to navigate a city stranger than anything either of them have ever seen to rescue her.Sam and Dean, newly reunited after Dean's miraculous return from Purgatory, investigate reports of mysterious disapperances and cattle theft near Cleveland. But the case turns out to be far more complex than they thought when an enemy they believed dead resurfaces, and they must ally with strange and dangerous creatures to protect all of Cleveland from their common enemy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alyndra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alyndra/gifts).



> This is an incredibly overdue fic for the endlessly patient Alyndra, for the 2017 Fandom Loves Puerto Rico auction. Thank you for the delicious prompt, and for your patience over the last year. I hope this is worth the wait!
> 
> Huge, huge thanks to my amazing betas Kate Nepveu, hit_the_books, and Lunin, without whom this fic would not have happened. You guys rock!

**Prologue**

Moon was not supposed to be here.

More accurately, the half-Fell queen Consolation and her flight weren’t supposed to be here, but they’d seen Opal Night’s warriors at the edge of the court’s territory and had flown up to say hello. They hadn’t realized the Opal Night warriors were escorting a visiting delegation from Indigo Cloud on the start of their journey back to their own colony tree. A delegation which included Moon and Jade, and considering the last time Moon had been this close to Consolation she’d been trying to steal him, it was a small wonder Jade hadn’t murdered anybody yet.

They’d all come to rest on a smallish midlevel platform which looked to have once been a grazing spot for grasseaters, but was now empty and overgrown. Jade and Consolation stood in the center of a circle of Raksura and Fell: a half-circle of Indigo Cloud and Opal Night warriors and Arbora behind Jade, and Consolation’s dakti behind her. Kethel was there, too, at the edge of the circle, watching Jade warily. Moon was outside the circle behind Jade, flanked protectively by Root, Chime, Briar, and Serene, all in their winged forms with their spines radiating tension. Stone stood at the edge of the platform, looking bored, but a tight set to his shoulders betrayed his annoyance with the situation.

The Fell flight was tense, too, clearly afraid - all of them had shifted to their groundling forms and were trying to look small and harmless. Consolation wore her odd half-Arbora half-ruler form, though she stood in front of Jade with her chin lifted. “I’m sorry,” she said for the fifth time. “We just wanted to say hello.”

“Of course you did,” Jade growled. It was the first she’d spoken, and Consolation flinched at the words. “The first time my consort is anywhere near you again and you _just happened_ to be flying by.”

“We were!” Consolation protested. “We fly around here a lot!” She turned to one of the Opal Night warriors. “Rise, tell her!”

Everyone looked at Rise, whose spines flicked uneasily. “This area’s rife with three-leafed vila and callaberries,” she said. Those were common ingredients in a variety of Raksuran household items. “I’ve seen the dakti around here before.”

Jade’s spines didn’t relax from their threatening posture. “It’s a very good excuse.”

Consolation spread her hands, desperation in her expression and the set of her spines. “It’s not an excuse! We don’t need your consort anymore—”

She broke off with a choking noise. A dark form stood behind her, and Moon jerked with surprise as he recognized it: Malachite, his birthqueen and the most dangerous Raksura in the Reaches. She could make people forget they’d seen her, as effective a trick as becoming entirely invisible. Even as he thought it, Moon’s memory supplied a vague recollection of her slipping through the ring of warriors to stand behind Consolation, the image as hazy as if he’d seen it through water. None of them had realized she was there until she’d wrapped one clawed hand around Consolation’s throat and begun to squeeze.

“One of the conditions of your presence here,” Malachite said, in an empty, deadly voice, “was to never come near Raksuran consorts. _Especially_ not consorts of my bloodline.”

Consolation clawed desperately at the hand around her throat, but she hadn’t shifted - probably couldn’t, thanks to Malachite’s queen’s power - and Malachite’s grip was like stone. Moon sighed and pushed forward, out from behind Chime and Serene. “Malachite!” he called.

Malachite didn’t look at him, all her attention on Consolation as the half-Fell queen choked.

Moon strode forward, dodging the warriors’ attempts to grab him and pull him back, and stepping past Jade with a glance. He believed Consolation, that it had been innocent happenstance which had caused this meeting. Not because he particularly trusted her, but because Kethel was there and Kethel wouldn’t have let her do anything that monumentally stupid. Moon might not _like_ the half-Fell, but they’d legitimately helped during the Hian incident and he wasn’t going to let Malachite murder the entire flight just because they’d picked the wrong time to be friendly.

He reached Malachite’s side and glared up at her. “It was an accident,” he said. This close, Malachite’s presence was nearly overwhelming, and Moon fought the urge to fling himself on the ground, to cower before her. But she was his birthqueen and he knew she would never hurt him, so he kept glaring and said again, “It was an accident. Let the flight go.” In as dry a voice he could manage, he added, “This was almost a pleasant visit. Let’s not spoil it by—”

The platform beneath their feet vanished.

Moon flapped his wings, but gravity pulled impossibly hard, the air swirling in a vortex around him, and he fell. He caught a glimpse of Malachite above him and Consolation as she plunged past him, semiconscious and wingless; Malachite had released her but they were both falling too, surrounded by absolute darkness. He couldn’t see Jade or the other Raksura anywhere, couldn’t see the platform or the dim green light that filtered down through the canopy. The vortex yanked at his wings and he folded them close against his back before they fouled. His stomach lurched, the world going hot and cold all at once, and he plunged down into darkness.

The world came back in a sudden rush of light and color. A moment later, so did his sense of both south and the position of the sun - neither in the same place they'd been a moment ago, and Moon's stomach twisted nauseatingly. He had an instant to see a group of groundlings standing in a circle around a metal-barred cage about twenty paces below him, and a crumpled form in the middle of the cage that was probably Consolation, stunned from the fall. Then something grabbed him by the tail and he jerked to a painful halt.

Moon twisted around and caught a glimpse of Malachite dangling by her foot claws from a metal crossbar overhead, one hand wrapped around Moon’s tail. Her dark eyes were focused on something past Moon, and he turned back to the groundlings below. A few of them had glanced up, but even as he watched, their eyes slid over Moon and Malachite as if they were invisible.

Not _as if_ , he realized. _Malachite_. She was doing what she’d done on the platform, using her queen’s power to make the groundlings forget about them. Moon had never been sure how well it worked on non-Raksura or Fell, but apparently it was enough to keep the groundlings from noticing them. They looked back down at the cage, where Consolation was just starting to stir. Two of them flipped a barred, hinged lid up over the top of the cage, locking her in, while another raised a long narrow black tube to its shoulder and pointed it at her. The tube made a low coughing sound and Consolation jerked. A feathered dart jutted from her chest; she slapped at it, but even as she did, her movements slowed. She blinked, her hand falling to her side, then slumped.

The groundlings waited a moment, but when Consolation didn't stir, one of them picked up a long handle attached to the side of the cage. Pulling the cage behind them, the groundlings filed across the floor to a wide opening in the far wall. Moon tugged against Malachite’s hold on his tail, wanting to go after them to rescue Consolation, but Malachite didn’t let go. A moment later, he realized why: more groundlings carrying the same long tube weapons as the one who’d shot Consolation stood in the shadows at the far edges of the room. Six of them, scattered far enough apart that Moon and Malachite - or Consolation, if she’d escaped the cage - wouldn’t be able to take all of them down before one of them got a shot off.

Moon swallowed back a hiss. They couldn’t let the groundlings take Consolation away - not that Moon had any particular affection for her, but he didn’t like the idea of groundlings stealing a half-Fell queen to do who knew what. But if he and Malachite tried to attack, they’d get shot by the tube weapons and probably captured. Malachite might have been able to sneak up on the armed groundlings the way she’d snuck up on Consolation, except that if she let go of Moon, he had nowhere to go but down to the middle of the floor. And while she’d been able to keep the few who’d looked up from noticing them, he doubted even her power would work against all of them if a winged, clawed, black-scaled Raksuran consort landed in their midst.

So they watched, Moon’s claws itching with the urge to leap down and attack, as the groundlings loaded Consolation’s cage into an enormous box sticking into the opening in the wall. To distract himself, he looked around the room, trying to figure out where they were. The place was big enough that Stone could have stood inside in his winged form and had plenty of space to stretch. The ceiling was some forty paces or more above the floor, crisscrossed with metal support beams like the one Malachite hung from, and there was no sign of the hole they’d fallen through to get here.

The floor was made of a strange pale grey stone, perfectly even throughout with no hints of block joins or tiles. Where the cage had been was a large, complicated circle of symbols, painted in something reddish-brown tinged with the coppery scent of blood. The symbols wound around and through each other in an eerie serpentine pattern, and trying to follow them with his eyes made Moon immediately nauseous. On one side of the circle, a woven mat held a chunk of pale, pitted stone with candles at each corner.

A groundling broke away from the group moving Consolation’s cage and quickly packed up the mat and its contents, loading them into the box as well. The ones with the weapons still hung back, frustratingly persistent, and when the groundlings around the cage finished loading it and climbed into the box, they didn’t follow. Finally, with a deep roar, the box shuddered to life and slid ponderously away.

Moon twitched with frustration, wanting to lunge after it, but Malachite still had him by the tail. The remaining groundlings finally emerged from the corners of the room, tossed their weapons casually into a pile, and picked up cleaning instruments, presumably to scrub away the symbol painted on the floor where the cage had been.

Malachite hissed, very softly, then let go of Moon’s tail.

He dropped straight down, flaring his wings to land directly on top of the two closest groundlings. He sliced open the first one’s throat before any of them realized what had happened, but they were fast: even as he turned to the second, its head distorted, its eyes and nose vanishing as its jaw stretched impossibly wide. Where a moment ago Moon would have sworn it had relatively standard groundling features, now its face was nothing but a gaping mouth filled with jagged predator teeth and a forked tongue. 

Moon opened its throat too, then had to leap back as a third lunged for him, its own gaping, razor-toothed jaw snapping. As fast as it was, though, it didn’t seem to have much combat experience. Moon dodged its attempts to bite him by bouncing straight up, wings flapping to gain lift, then dropped down on its back. His claws slashed the thing’s throat and he jumped away again as viscous black blood spurted out of the wound.

Turning, he saw that Malachite had already disposed of the other three groundlings. Abandoning their bodies on the floor, she leapt across the room to the opening where the big cargo box had been.

Then froze, her spines conveying enough surprise that Moon could actually read it.

He followed her across the room, coming up short as he saw what was outside. A short path led up to a broad roadway, both made of the same smooth grey stone as the floor of the building. Metal carriages zipped past at absurdly high speeds, each with four wheels and multicolored lights that shone like miniature suns in the nighttime darkness. Past the endless flow of vehicles towered more massive buildings like the one they stood in, some with big wheeled boxes parked in front, nearly all of them studded with brightly-glowing windows. _Warehouses and loading bays_ , Moon thought, but the vehicles serving them were nothing like anything he’d seen anywhere in the Three Worlds. Even in Imperial Kish there hadn’t been anything like this.

Past the bizarre buildings, more lights glittered against the horizon. Buildings, Moon realized abruptly, as his eyes picked out the blocky shapes framing the lights. Buildings the size of a small mountain-tree, dozens of them, clustered together in the middle of a vast carpet of more brilliant lights. It was night, but Moon could hardly see any stars past the brilliant glow - and the ones he could see were nothing like any constellations he knew.

Moon said, “This is…” and then floundered, because he had no idea what this was.

“This is going to be a problem,” Malachite said dryly, and Moon almost laughed.

_Problem_ was an understatement.


	2. Chapter 2

“I'm telling you, Sammy, it's werewolves,” Dean said cheerfully. The Impala rumbled beneath him, its steering wheel solid and familiar in his hands. Sam sat in the passenger seat, wearing an exasperated look and holding a stack of news printouts. The sun was bright overhead, painting the flat plains of Ohio with brilliant colors whose intensity was still nearly painful, after a year in the dull greys of Purgatory.

Dean had been home for over a month, but he didn't think he'd ever get over the colors.

“It's not werewolves,” Sam said. “Werewolves go after humans, not livestock. And what about the report of giant flying creatures?”

“Bats,” Dean suggested. “It's a farm, right? Farms have bats.” At least, he was pretty sure they did. Farms were all about the ecosystem, and weren't bats supposed to be good for the ecosystem or something?

Sam’s expression suggested that Dean didn't know what he was talking about. But Sam wasn't the one who’d spent a year fighting for his life in monster hell. Sam had hit a dog and met a girl, had dropped out of the hunting life altogether, which meant Dean was the resident expert ( _ignoring the little voice in his head reminding him that Sam had believed Dean and Cas dead in Heaven and therefore had only done what they’d agreed by not looking for them_ ).

Dean made himself focus on the road, on the hunt. Cas was gone and it was Dean’s fault ( _unless it was Sam's for not finding them_ ), and there wasn't anything he could do about it. But he _could_ help the people in Cleveland, who were suffering from what sounded an awful lot like a werewolf attack.

“Look,” he said out loud to Sam, “what else could it be? Cows going missing, people vanishing right before the full moon, then turning up again after and acting weird. Textbook werewolf.”

“Except werewolves attack people, not cows,” Sam shot back, “and they specifically eat hearts. It's not werewolves.”

“We don't know they didn't eat the cow hearts,” Dean said, and grinned at his brother. “Twenty bucks says it's furry sons of bitches who thought cows were easier prey than people.” He paused. “Maybe they're fat. Fat werewolves, is that a thing? Too fat to chase people.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Your exit's coming up,” he said dryly.

Dean took the exit and followed Sam’s directions into Cleveland proper. They'd been driving all day, so they hit up a motel first, long enough to ditch their gear in a room and change into Fed monkey suits. After a year of wearing the same jeans, flannel, and jacket, the suit was unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and constricting, and Dean kept tugging on his tie until Sam pulled his hand down. Dean glared at him, Sam grinned, and for a moment things almost felt normal.

Fake Fed badges in hand, they went to the police station, finding the detective in charge of the investigation - such as it was. “There's not much of a connection,” Detective Carmichael told them ruefully. They sat in his tiny office, surrounded by post-it notes and sheets of printer paper covered in messy handwriting. “The disappearances happened all over the city, starting two weeks ago: eighteen males and eleven females. One of the males and three of the women are still missing. Everyone else turned back up within forty-eight hours, claiming everything from plain forgetfulness to a bender at the bar.”

“Do you have contact information for the vics?” Sam asked. “Both the ones who turned back up, and the ones who are still missing?”

“Sure,” the detective said. He shuffled some papers off his computer’s keyboard and began pecking at the keys. As he worked, he added, “You boys ever been to Cleveland before?”

Dean frowned. “Not in a long time. Why?”

“You look kinda familiar,” Carmichael said absently. “I was just wondering if we’d ever worked together before.”

“I doubt it,” Dean said. “Last time I was here was over a decade ago.”

Carmichael looked up from the keyboard to eye him doubtfully. “They must’ve started you young, huh?”

“You have no idea,” Dean said, and grinned.

Carmichael chuckled. “Guess I’m thinking of someone else, then. Anyway,” he continued, “I don’t know why this case caught the FBI’s interest, but I’m glad for the help. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“How so?” Dean asked.

“Well, of the vics who are still missing, all of ‘em are related to one of the vics who turned back up. But the ones who turned back up all claim the ones who are missing, aren’t missing - they’re out of town on a business trip, or visiting family, or on a ‘meditation retreat’.”

“So who reported them missing?” Sam asked.

“Other relatives,” Carmichael answered. “Coworkers. Friends. Here.” An ancient printer rattled to life on a table behind him, and he turned to pull off the sheets as they were spat out. He handed the topmost one to Sam, pointing at the name at the top of the list. “Robert Whelan missed all of his appointments with clients on October 26, and no one saw or heard from him over the weekend. His wife Jackie didn’t show up for work the following Monday. On Wednesday her manager called her home and got no answer. He called us the next day, and the beat cop who checked the house spoke to Robert, who said Jackie was camping with her sister in Florida. I wasn’t able to get in touch with the sister to confirm the story.”

Dean glanced at Sam. The full moon had been on the 29th, three days after Robert Whelan had vanished, and the same day Jackie hadn’t shown up for work. Sam pressed his lips together but didn’t say anything.

Detective Carmichael pointed to another name on the printout. “Aleksander Kaspar. He missed work without explanation on the 26th, and his son Jacob missed football practice that day. The next day Jacob didn’t show up for his job at Tim Horton’s, either. His teammate who works with him at the Horton’s called us. Apparently Aleksander had started drinking heavily after his wife died a few years back, and the teammate said Jacob had been afraid of his dad. But when we talked to Aleksander, he said he’d sent Jacob to visit his grandmother in Poland because she’s dying and he wanted his son to see her one last time.” Carmichael gave them a wry smile. “Of course, we can’t reach the grandmother in Poland to confirm the story. I have a request out to the airlines who fly out of CLE and the regionals for passenger info, but it takes a while to jump through their hoops.” He sighed. “The other two are the same. One person goes missing for a couple days, then a relative vanishes for good, and there’s a plausible but unconfirmable excuse.”

“And all the other people who vanished around the twenty-ninth have come back?” Dean said.

Carmichael nodded. “Technically, they aren’t part of this investigation anymore. Adults are allowed to drop off the radar for a couple days all they want - nothing illegal about that. But twenty-nine people going missing over the same five-day period, and not all coming back… I can’t shake the feeling something else is going on.”

“Well, we agree with you,” Dean said, and flashed Carmichael a bland smile. “It’s why we’re here.”

“I appreciate it, believe me,” Carmichael said. “If there’s any way I can help, let me know.”

“We will,” Sam said. He gathered up the printouts and held out a hand for Carmichael to shake. “Thanks.”

“Good luck,” Carmichael said as they left. “Case like this, you’re gonna need it.”

* * *

“Anything?” Dean asked. They sat in a little diner tucked away on a side street off Cleveland’s downtown. Dean had eaten there way back when he was still hunting with Dad while Sam was off at college; a decade later, the food was just as good as he remembered. Sam, being Sam, had only ordered a salad, but Dean had polished off a burger nearly the size of his head. He wiped his fingers on a napkin and tugged at the screen of Sam’s laptop, trying to swivel it to where he could see.

“Nothing,” Sam said, sounding frustrated. “There’s a few tenuous connections between some of the ones who reappeared - four of them work for the same antiquities import company, and another six have ties to the Port of Cleveland and the Port Authority office. The others who’ve turned back up include a lake freighter captain, a butcher, a blacksmith, and a variety of manual laborers. The only thing the ones still missing have in common is being related to one of the original twenty-five people who vanished around the 26th.”

“Two stages,” Dean said thoughtfully.

Sam nodded. “Whatever it was, it hit those twenty-five people first. Probably the four missing vics witnessed it, or caught on right after—”

“And bye, bye, Birdie,” Dean muttered. “Twenty-five werewolves, Jesus Christ.”

“We don’t know it’s werewolves,” Sam insisted.

Dean grinned at him and flashed the twenty-dollar bill he’d pulled out to pay their tab. “What else could it be?” he said. “I say it’s werewolves.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. For a second Dean thought he was going to be his usual spoilsport self and refuse the bet, but then he said, “You’re on.”

“Great.” Dropping the money on the table, Dean pushed out of his chair and stood. Sam followed, tucking the laptop under one arm. “Where to next?” Dean asked as they walked.

“Talk to the people who went missing and came back,” Sam suggested.

“Think that’ll do any good?” Dean asked. “If they’re regular werewolves, they won’t remember their little furry excursions. If they’re close enough to the alpha, they might remember but sure as hell won’t tell us anything.”

“Still worth a shot,” Sam said. “If we head to the port, we can talk to a bunch of them at once.”

The Impala’s keys jangled in Dean’s hand. “Let’s do it.”

* * *

_I was on vacation. My secretary just forgot to put in on my calendar and then got worried._

_I got sick. Stomach flu or something. Spent three days puking my guts out over the toilet._

_Look, don’t tell my boss, but I was really hungover, okay? Shoulda called in sick but I forgot._

_I wasn’t missing. The police already asked a bunch of questions about this. What’s the big deal?_

Three hours later, Dean and Sam had managed to find four of the six “victims” who worked around the Port Authority office. The other two worked on the docks themselves, and would be harder to reach. But the ones they’d talked to had all had the same bland, vaguely annoyed response to being asked about their October 26th disappearances.

“That was useless,” Dean grumbled as he and Sam retreated to the Impala.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. He shook his head, tossing his hair out of his eyes. He’d let it grow long while Dean was in Purgatory, and Dean wasn’t sure yet if he liked the look. It made Sam look like a hippy. _More_ like a hippy. “But something’s definitely up,” Sam continued. “All of them were hiding something.”

Dean grunted. “If this is a coordinated wolf pack, we probably just tipped them off. We’ll have to move fast.”

“Not too fast,” Sam said. “We still need to go talk to the owners of that farm.”

“That farm?” Dean had almost forgotten about the farm with its report of stolen cattle.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “The police report said that they lost two cows in one night. No signs of breaking and entering, just… missing cows the next morning.”

“It’s probably not worth it,” Dean said. “We find where the wolves are hanging out, we’ll find those cow bones.”

“First, the cows only disappeared two nights ago,” Sam said. “Well after the full moon. And second, cows are huge. Like, sixteen hundred pounds huge. Even a transformed werewolf - and for the record, I still don’t think it’s werewolves - wouldn’t be able to just toss one over their shoulder and walk away.”

“Why do you know how much a cow weighs?” Dean said. Sam gave him his favorite look of flat exasperation; Dean grinned cheerfully back, and said, “Still. That’s a good point - the pack might have a gathering place somewhere near the farm. They might not be able to throw a cow over a shoulder, but enough of ‘em could drag one. And maybe they’re prepping for the next full moon. Have a slab of beef already pulled out and ready to eat.”

“The police report _also_ mentioned flying creatures on the security camera,” Sam said. “Which are definitely _not_ werewolves.”

“Because they’re bats,” Dean said. They reached the Impala and he unlocked the doors. “Seriously, man. We’ve never seen anything that can fly like that.”

“What about those dragons we ran into a couple years back?” Sam said as they climbed in.”They could fly.”

“They went after virgins, not cows,” Dean said, then paused as a thought occurred to him. “Maybe the cows were virgins?”

Sam swatted him on the arm with a sheaf of paper. “You’re gross.”

“ _Cows_ are gross,” Dean corrected him. “They chew cud and fart all the time.” He started the engine and pulled out onto the street. “Look, it’s not dragons, okay? I mean, seriously. What are the odds that two completely different kinds of nasties set up shop in Cleveland at the same time?”

Sam just rolled his eyes.

* * *

“I jinxed it, didn’t I?” Dean muttered under his breath to Sam. “Never tell me the odds. I should know better by now.”

“Sorry, what?” Leanna Scott asked. They stood in her office at Scotts’ Adventure Farm, an hour outside Cleveland proper, watching the security camera footage captured of the cow pen the night of the cows’ disappearance. Footage which clearly showed a pair of large, winged... _somethings_ stooping like hawks on the herd. Whatever they were, they were damned fast - Leanna had slowed the footage down as much as she could, but the creatures were only onscreen for a couple of blurry frames. They couldn’t make out any details; the angle wasn’t very good and the lighting was worse, but it was obvious that it wasn’t bats. No normal bat was big enough and strong enough to fly off with a cow caught in its back claws.

“Nothing,” Dean said to Leanna, and flashed her a bland smile. “When did this happen?”

“Two days ago,” Leanna said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose under her glasses, trying and failing to hide a sniffle. She was a handsome woman in her late fifties or early sixties, with grey hair pulled back in a ponytail and smile lines around her brown eyes. Her family had run Scotts’ Adventure Farm for years as a combination working farm and family attraction, and the website Sam had read from on the drive over had said that the Scotts loved their dairy animals like pets. Clearly she was distraught over the loss of the two cows.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said gently.

Leanna took a breath, trying to calm down. “We noticed immediately, but we thought they’d just found a hole in the fence or something. It wasn’t until we looked at the security tape that we saw… whatever that was.”

“And you called the police?” Dean asked.

She nodded. “They think we’re crazy. They think we staged it for _attention,_ or _publicity_.” She spat the word like it was foul. “We don’t need this kind of publicity. We’re a family attraction!”

Sam made a noise of polite agreement. “Well, we’re not the police,” he said. “We don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Thanks,” Leanna said tiredly. “I guess you see a lot of weird stuff in the FBI, huh?”

“You have no idea,” Dean said. Leanna glanced at him, and behind her, Sam rolled his eyes at Dean in exasperation. Dean resisted the urge to make a face back, and asked Leanna, “Was there anything else weird about that night? Or the day before or after?”

“Weirder than giant flying things stealing my cows?” Leanna said dryly.

“Anything at all,” Sam said. He was doing his earnest voice, the good ol’ boy thing that made people open up to him like he was their best friend. “Other things going missing, or turning up in places they shouldn’t have. Cold spots. Electronics acting up. Strange sounds.”

Leanna eyed him uncertainly; Dean added quickly, “Just routine questions, ma’am. Helps you remember better.”

Her fingers tapped against her elbow. Dean knew a tell when he saw one, and leaned in a little, conspiratorily. “You saw something,” he prompted.

“Well…” she hedged. Sam leaned in, too, and finally Leanna said, “I was going to tell the police, but they were so… so _rude_ , so dismissive. I knew if I told them they’d just say it was another publicity stunt.”

“Tell them what?” Sam prompted.

“When we first went out to the barn that morning,” Leanna said. “Before we even knew the cows were gone… Right in front of the door, on the ground, there were these two wallets.”

Dean blinked. “Wallets?”

“Yeah,” Leanna said. “Hang on a sec, I’ll get them.” She bustled over to a filing cabinet on the far side of the office. Pulling a keyring from her pocket, she unlocked the top drawer, retrieved a pair of wallets from it, and shut it again. She held out the wallets to Sam and Dean. “Here. At first we thought they belonged to someone who’d come through the day before, and maybe the dogs had found them and put them by the barn. —Unlikely, I know,” she added when Dean raised a skeptical eyebrow, “but Bonnie and Clyde are pretty smart for dogs.”

Sam, who had started to open one of the wallets, perked up. “Your dogs are named Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Yep,” Leanna said, and smiled. “Their puppies are Thelma, Louise, Lula, and Ripley.”

“That’s great,” Dean cut in - he really didn’t want to hear about dogs - “but these wallets you found, they were just sitting in front of the barn?”

Leanna nodded, her expression going serious again. “Right on the step, like someone wanted us to see them.”

Dean glanced at Sam, but his brother looked as baffled as he felt. Turning his attention to the wallet in his hand, Dean flipped it open. The driver’s license window was empty, but the rest of the pockets were stuffed full of cards. He pulled out the topmost one, a credit card - and spotted a familiar name on the bottom. He held it up to Sam. “Hey.”

Sam looked, then wordlessly held up a credit card from his own mystery wallet. That one, too, belonged to one of the twenty-nine “victims” of the disappearances two weeks ago.

“What is it?” Leanna asked, looking between them. “You know who they belong to?”

“Sort of,” Dean hedged. He flipped through the rest of the wallet, finding several more credit cards, about a dozen loyalty cards, a blank white card that was probably a keycard for a workplace door, some crumpled receipts, and nearly two hundred dollars in cash.

“They’re connected to another case we’re working on,” Sam explained. “We weren’t sure the cases were related, but it looks like they are.”

“You think whoever stole the cows left the wallets?” Dean asked him. “Why the hell would they do that?”

Sam pressed his lips together. “A plant, maybe? A really bad frame job?”

Dean shook his head. “A three-year-old with popsicle sticks and craft glue could do a better frame than this,” he muttered. Out loud to Leanna, he said, “Mind if we keep these?”

She shrugged. “Go for it. We didn’t know what to do with them, anyway.”

“Thanks.” Dean stuck the wallet in a pocket and glanced up at Sam, who nodded. They were done here.

They thanked Leanna and left her with one of their fake FBI cards in case she thought of anything else that might help, then headed back to the motel room. As Dean drove, Sam flipped through the wallets again, squinting to see in the falling twilight. “A hundred eighty-seven dollars in this one,” he said thoughtfully. “Two hundred forty in this one. And almost a dozen credit cards between them.”

“Think someone stole them?”

“Maybe,” Sam said. He paused, digging through both of them once more, then said, “There’s not a driver’s license in either one.”

“If you’re gonna steal a wallet, why take the license but not the cash?” Dean asked. His hands tightened on the steering wheel in annoyed frustration. This was supposed to have been a simple werewolf-killing job, not a multi-monster mystery. “And why leave them in front of a barn where someone just stole two cows?”

“Good question,” Sam said. Then sat up straight, realization on his face. “Wait. What if the cows weren’t stolen?”

Dean shot him a sideways glance. “Pretty sure Leanna would’ve noticed if the cows were still around—”

“No,” Sam said, and held up the cash from one of the wallets. “What if the cows were _bought_?”

“Okay, I don’t know anything about farms but I’m pretty sure two cows are worth more than four hundred dollars,” Dean said.

Sam shrugged. “Whoever did this was smart enough to take out the driver’s licenses, and probably any other photo ID, but they left the credit cards and other stuff with the owners’ names on them. Maybe we’re dealing with something that doesn’t interact with humans all that much.”

“Most monsters interact with humans a lot, though,” Dean pointed out. “I mean, hell, a lot of ‘em _live_ as humans part of the time.”

“Maybe… someone who can’t read?” Sam suggested. “Or at least, can’t read English and doesn’t understand enough about credit cards to know that the owner’s name is printed on the front?”

“That’s a pretty big _maybe_ ,” Dean grumbled.

“It’s not like hunters give literacy tests to the things they kill,” Sam said, and in the back of Dean’s mind he couldn’t help but notice Sam said _hunters_ and _they_ , not _we._ It was Stanford all over again, Sam trying to escape the family business the moment he had a chance, and Dean still hated how quickly his brother gave it up.

“It’s not like you have any idea what hunters do, Mister Civilian-with-a-Girlfriend,” Dean said, and maybe it came out sharper than he’d meant, because Sam glanced at him from under those stupid long bangs, then looked away out the window and didn’t say anything else. It was Sam’s own damn fault; he was the one who’d said he was done once they found Kevin and the tablet.

But the silence stretched and grew awkward, and Dean was still trying to figure out what to say when his phone rang. He pulled it out and set it to speaker. “Yeah?”

“Agent Sambora?” a male voice asked.

It took Dean a second to recognize the voice of Detective Carmichael from the Cleveland PD. “Detective,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Sorry for calling you so late, but I’ve got some news hot off the press,” the detective said. On the other side of the car, Sam sat up straighter, focusing on the phone. “So, four days ago we got called to a warehouse for a B&E, possible grisly murder.”

Dean raised an eyebrow at the phone - that was quite the jump - as Carmichael continued, “Apparently the floor of the place was covered in this gross black tarry stuff and weird cult symbols written in blood - but there were no bodies. Preliminary lab results just got back, and the Satanic symbols were written in pig’s blood, but the black goo is apparently _human_ blood. Somehow. The lab techs aren’t really sure what’s mixed in that’s making it look like that.”

“That’s… pretty weird,” Sam agreed. He shot Dean a concerned glance, and Dean made a face back. Black blood could mean several things, none of them good.

“Oh, it gets weirder,” Carmichael said dryly. “They ran the blood against some recent samples, and turns out bits of it came up matching DNA we picked up while investigating those twenty-nine missing people a few weeks ago. The techs are still sorting it out - apparently there were a _lot_ of puddles and they got pretty mixed up spreading across the floor of the warehouse - but so far we have confirmed matches for Jerrie Berg, Sydney Nemec, and Vincent Barret.”

Sam silently held up a credit card from one of the wallets they’d gotten from the farm. The name on it was Vincent Barret.

“Great,” Dean said into the phone. “Have your guys check for Chase Perrault next.”

There was a pause, then Carmichael said, “Sounds like you know something I don’t.”

“We have a possible lead,” Sam said. “We’ll let you know as soon as we figure out what it means, but we need to know if Perrault was one of the vics of that warehouse attack.”

“Sure thing,” Carmichael said. “Call me when you know something.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, and hung up.

Sam was already flipping through his stack of printouts. “Perrault and Barret both work at World Curios and Rarities, a high-end antiquities import company.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen antiquities dealers get mixed up with the wrong occult artifact,” Dean said. “Want to check out their offices?”

“It’s almost nine PM,” Sam pointed out. “They’ll be closed.”

Dean plucked Barret’s wallet out of Sam’s lap and, one-handed, rifled through it until he found the blank white keycard he’d noticed earlier. “Bet you they have after-hours access.”

Sam nodded. “Let’s do it.”


	3. Chapter 3

The office of World Curios and Rarities was housed on the twenty-seventh floor of the Erieview Tower, the fourth-tallest building in Cleveland. The lobby was indeed closed, but the keycard from Vincent Barret’s wallet opened the front doors easily. The visitor’s desk was empty, which was just as well; Dean and Sam had stopped on the way over to change out of their Fed monkey suits and load up on weapons. The office was probably as empty as the rest of the building, but if something shady _was_ going on, after hours was a good time to do it, and Dean had hunted long enough to never walk into a potential meeting with his target unarmed.

“Dude,” Sam had said as Dean dropped a clip of silver bullets into his jacket pocket. “It's not werewolves.”

“We don't know that,” Dean shot back.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Black blood, occult symbols, and the tie to an antique shop aren't enough for you?”

In truth, Dean didn't think it was werewolves either, not anymore. Sam had a point: none of the clues added up to furry heart-eaters no matter how hard you squinted. But werewolves weren't the only fuglies that were weak to silver in some form, and Dean didn't want to admit his hit-a-dog-and-met-a-girl kid brother was right. A twenty-dollar bet was nothing to sneeze at.

So he’d loaded up on silver, but also brought regular bullets, his Purgatory knife, a couple wooden stakes carved from various types of wood, and a handful of other things that could be useful. The weapons were a comfortable weight in his jacket as he hit the elevator button in the lobby, then slouched against the wall. Any rent-a-cop worth paying for would know Dean - and Sam, for that matter, who’d passed on the silver but otherwise loaded up just as thoroughly as Dean - was armed, but this late at night they were alone in the lobby. Which hopefully meant they could snoop around the office unnoticed, find a shipping manifest or something that identified whatever ancient mystic relic was behind this whole mess. Then they could get on with the interesting part: finding the monsters and ganking them.

The elevator arrived with a cheerfully loud ding, and they headed up to the twenty-seventh floor. The elevator doors opened on a plain hallway, as generic as office halls got, and they had to wander around for a minute before finding the innocuous door marked with the name “World Curios and Rarities” in neat gold letters. Dean tried the knob - and blinked in surprise when it turned easily. He shot a warning glance at Sam, who fell back out of the doorway’s line of sight, then Dean pushed open the door.

The office beyond was warmly lit, decorated in elegant golds and mahoganies with tasteful embellishments probably meant to display something or other about the kinds of antiques the company dealt in. Not that Dean knew much about antiques, except that all too often they turned out to be possessed or haunted or cursed. A row of matching carved wooden chairs sat against one wall, and a large desk occupied the back half of the room.

An elderly woman sat behind the desk, wearing a floral blouse and gold-rimmed spectacles. The nameplate in front of her read _Margaret._ She looked up as Dean entered the room and smiled politely. “Can I help you?”

Dean blinked again, too off-guard to respond; he’d been expecting either an empty office or an ambush. Behind him Sam said, “Uh, hi. We’re looking for…” A pause and a rustle of paper as he consulted his notes for the names of the two employees who weren’t presumably dead. “Johan Wood or Benjamin Valencia?”

“Oh, you must be the visitors they were expecting,” Margaret said brightly.

“They’re expecting us?” Sam said. He sounded uneasy, and Dean knew what his brother was thinking: _we tipped them off._

“Yep,” Margaret said. “They’re already up on the roof, and they said to send you up when you got here.”

“On the roof?” Dean asked. “What the hell are they doing up there?”

Margaret eyed him, her cheerful secretary’s demeanor fading. “Aren’t you here to work on the new project with them?”

“Not exactly,” Sam said. He came up beside Dean and they pulled out their Fed badges in unison. As Margaret stared at the badges, Sam continued, “We think they might have information related to a case we’re working on.”

“I… see,” Margaret said, sounding flustered. Most civilians did when the badges came out.

“When did they start this new project?” Dean asked. “Do you know what it is?”

“Just… just today,” Margaret said. “I have no idea what it is, or why they need to be up on the roof for it.” She fluttered her hands nervously. “I’m sorry. They didn’t tell me anything, just that some business associates would be stopping by to help them out.”

Sam flashed her that warm smile he used to put people at ease. “It’s fine,” he said. “Do they normally have you stay late like this?”

She shook her head. “No. I was actually supposed to go to dinner with my husband tonight. But Mr. Valencia said this is a very important project, that the future of the company depends on it. And he said that they might be hungry after working on it, and wanted me to stay to arrange a working dinner and…” She waved her hands again. “Help out, I suppose.”

Dean rolled his eyes at Sam, and his brother grimaced back. _Hungry_. If her bosses had turned into supernatural predators of some kind, Margaret wouldn’t be helping _arrange_ dinner - she’d _be_ dinner. Dean had been about to ask her whether her bosses had been acting strangely lately, whether they’d had any explanation for going missing two weeks ago with the others, but he had a feeling he knew what the answer was. “Look,” he said. “We’re gonna go up and have a chat with your bosses. You go home and take your husband out to a late dinner. Maybe call in sick tomorrow.”

Margaret looked between him and Sam, her eyes very wide. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Trust us,” Sam said. He slipped around the desk, somehow managing to help her out of her chair and lead her to the door before she’d quite realized what was going on. “Everything’s going to be fine, but you go home, and you stay with your husband for a while, okay?”

Dean followed them out of the office, pausing to snag her purse where she’d left it tucked under the desk, and handed it to her as she stuttered protests to Sam. He flashed her a smile, not bothering to hide the Purgatory predator that lurked underneath, and said over her protests, “Go home. Now.”

Margaret fled.

Sam waited until she’d rounded the corner to the elevator lobby and they heard the ding of the elevator’s arrival. Then he looked at Dean and raised an eyebrow. “Dude.”

“What?” Dean waved him off and headed back into the office. Their quarry waited upstairs, but they might as well take the time to check the office for any clues before walking into an obvious trap. Behind him, Sam huffed in annoyance, then followed him.

Their search of the tiny office didn’t turn up much. Behind the reception area where Margaret sat, a door opened onto a long space filled with ten overflowing cubicles, several stuffed bookshelves, and a variety of shipping crates and boxes in various states of unpacked. Dean rifled through the crates for anything that looked interesting, while Sam stuffed sheafs of paper and file folders into his bag to review later.

Finally the itch to spring the trap got too loud for Dean to ignore, and he thumped Sam on the shoulder where he was poking at Johan Wood’s computer. “C’mon, we’ve kept those sons of bitches waiting long enough.”

Sam rolled his eyes, but he was apparently just as ready to throw down as Dean because he didn’t complain. Pulling a thumb drive out of the computer, he dropped it into his bag along with the rest of the papers he’d taken, and followed Dean back to the elevators.

* * *

“Is it just me,” Moon said, “or does it look like they’re setting up an ambush?”

Malachite didn’t answer. Not that Moon had expected her to - her gaze was fixed on the roof of the building several streets away, where groundlings who smelled like the ones who’d kidnapped Consolation bustled around hurriedly. It was the first time they’d managed to pick up the scent since leaving the warehouse. The groundlings’ smell was distinctive but not nearly as strong as that of the Fell, and this strange city was even bigger - and smellier - than the Kish capital where Jade and Stone had had to search for Moon last year. The only reason Malachite had even caught the scent was because the groundlings were up on that high roof, above the stench of the city.

But why they were setting up an ambush on top of one of the city’s tallest buildings - or who it might be for - Moon had no idea. He watched them for another minute or two, but they’d apparently finished their preparations and were settling in to wait for their prey. He glanced at Malachite and flicked a spine in a question.

She flicked a spine back. The minimalism of the movement told Moon just how focused she was - but nothing else useful, like what she actually wanted him to do. Annoyed, he said, “I’m not one of your warriors.”

Malachite did look at him then, the tip of her tail lashing in irritation; Moon bared his fangs at her. He was just as sick as she was of being trapped in this place, but they couldn’t go back until they found Consolation, which meant Malachite had to stop playing “big scary queen” and actually work with him. She said, “Go down to the bottom and flush them upwards.”

“You think there’s more of them?”

“We saw more in that warehouse,” she said, and if her tone was one of annoyance at his denseness, at least she was talking. “Besides. They’re waiting for something.”

Then he got it. “But they aren’t waiting for _us_.”

He thought he caught the faintest hint of a smile on her face in the instant before he dove off the ledge they were perched on, his wings snapping open to carry him down to the base of the other building.

* * *

The elevator took Dean and Sam up to the tower’s fortieth floor, dark and silent this late at night. An emergency evacuation map near the elevator doors showed that this floor was laid out like an H, with the elevator lobby taking up the middle bar, and offices along the sides and in the center. The door to the roof was conveniently marked on the map, probably for situations where it would be safer to go up to the roof than to try to get down forty floors; it was in the far corner at the top right of the H. Dean signled for Sam to go start disabling any locks or alarms, then took off in the opposite direction.

Just because their baddies had told Margaret the receiptionist that they’d be on the roof, didn’t mean they weren’t waiting somewhere on this floor where the Winchesters wouldn’t be expecting them yet. Dean went up and down the left side of the H, but there weren’t many places to hide - the long hall only had a handful of doors, all of which were locked. He doubled back, passed through the elevator lobby, and headed down the bottom right of the H, tossing a glance up the hall to where Sam still knelt in front of the roof door at the other end.

He’d just reached the first office door when a cheerful ding rang out from the elevator lobby.

Dean darted into the niche where the door was set into the wall, digging out his phone as he went. No one else should be up here at almost ten PM; either this was the world’s worst-timed janitor, or their baddies had called in backup. He heard the elevator doors slide open, but no footsteps on the soft carpet. He risked glancing down at his phone to make sure his text to Sam was coherent - _hide someones coming_ \- then hit _send_.

At the far end of the hall, Sam was just standing up, the roof door swinging open. Dean saw him twitch as his phone vibrated; Sam pulled it out and glanced at it, then immediately slipped through the door to the roof, out of sight. Which wasn’t what Dean would have chosen, given the likelihood of this being another monster, but if this side of the building had as few offices as the other, Sam might not have had any better options. Hopefully their visitor really was just a janitor who had no reason to go up to the roof.

Dean eased up against the edge of his niche, peeking out into the hallway in time to see a young man step around the corner, turning unerringly toward the roof door. _Definitely not a janitor_ , Dean thought. The guy was barefoot, for one thing, with straight black hair longer than Sam’s hanging loose around his shoulders. He was tall and lean, and his brown skin and high cheekbones suggested a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon heritage, though Dean couldn’t begin to guess beyond that. His clothes were as out of place as the rest of him: tough leather pants dyed black with elegant embroidery down the sides, and a black silk shirt with subtle patterns stitched along the hem. He wore a heavy gold bracelet around one wrist, but no other visible jewelry.

The man’s head turned as he moved, as though he was looking around for danger, and he slowed as he approached the roof door at the far end of the hallway. He paused in front of the door, and Dean barely jerked his head back in time as the guy looked down the hallway in his direction. He waited, counting to ten in his head, then peeked back out.

The roof door was just drifting shut, the mystery man nowhere in sight.

_Shitshitshit._ Dean darted out of his hiding spot and ran up the hall. Whoever or whatever that guy was, he was clearly not one of the building’s vanilla mortal tenants. Sam was hiding somewhere behind that door, and if this guy was on the side of the monsters, Sam would be in trouble.

The door hadn’t latched closed, the stiff bolt catching on the frame, and Dean hesitated for a second outside it, ears straining for any sound of a fight. But the only sound was his own tense breaths. Maybe Sam’d got lucky and there was somewhere beyond the door to hide. Resting a hand on his gun, Dean nudged the roof door open and stepped through.

It was even darker past the door than it was in the hallway; only the bright red EXIT sign over the doorframe provided any illumination. A short, cement-floored hallway led to a concrete stairwell that rose up into darkness, the landing where the stairs doubled back on themselves faintly lit by the reflected light of another EXIT sign at the top. A light switch sat beside the door and Dean tried flipping it, but nothing happened. Could be just a dead bulb in a little-used stairwell, or deliberate sabotage, but the result was the same either way: no light to illuminate the stairwell.

Dean debating pulling out his flashlight, but his eyes had already adjusted to the dim light and the flash would be a dead giveaway of his position to any baddies waiting to ambush him. He drew his gun instead, flicking the safety off and holding it by his leg pointed to the ground, then eased forward. He made it up the stairs to the landing with no sign of either Sam or the mystery man, though the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up like something was watching him.

He was near the top of the second flight when a voice hissed, barely audible, “Dean?”

Dean barely managed not to jump like a little girl. He squinted into the darkness, looking for the source of the voice. The red EXIT-sign light was a little brighter up here, and after a moment he made out Sam crouched on the other side of a railing that surrounded the stairwell. The stairs ended in the middle of a largeish room which housed a series of pipes, fans, and other HVAC equipment; a door on the far wall presumably led out onto the roof itself. There was no sign of the mystery man, or the guys he and Sam had been hunting in the first place.

Dean climbed up the rest of the way into the room as Sam stood up from where he’d crouched with his own gun in hand. Pitching his voice low enough not to carry past the hum of the HVAC system, Dean said, “Did that guy go out onto the roof or what?”

Sam shook his head. “There was no guy. I got your text and hid up here. You’re the first one to come through.”

“What?” Dean demanded. “I saw the guy go in here. I mean, I think I did.” Sam raised an eyebrow at him and he clarified, “I had to hide for a second, but there wasn’t anywhere else he could’ve gone.”

Sam’s eyes darted to the stairwell, unease written across his face, but all he said was, “What do you want to do?”

Dean hesitated. On the one hand, they had the mystery guy who’d apparently vanished into thin air, whose motives were unknown and whose involvement could only be assumed on the basis of “he looks weird”. On the other hand, they had the obvious trap they _knew_ was waiting for them on the roof, with an unknown number of unknown monsters.

The smart thing to do would be to get the hell out of there, regroup, and come back after they had a better idea of what they were up against. But Dean hadn’t white-knuckled his way out of Purgatory by doing the smart thing.

He pointed at the door out to the roof. “We spring the trap,” he said firmly. At Sam’s incredulous expression, he added, “Look, it ain’t gonna get any less risky if we run away and come back. We know where they are and what they’re doing right now. Might as well take advantage of it.”

“What about your guy?” Sam asked.

“If he wants to get involved,” Dean said, with a shrug more casual than he felt, “he’ll turn up.”

Sam opened his mouth, closed it again, and shrugged. “Let’s do it.”

* * *

Moon would never not be glad that groundlings rarely thought to look _up_. He’d known there were two groundlings on the top floor of the building with him; had caught their scents the moment he’d stepped out of the mechanical lifting room, fresh enough to be distinct from the other scents that had sunk into the walls and carpet. He was also pretty sure they were the groundlings _his_ groundlings were waiting to ambush - there was no other reason for them to be skulking around up here when all the other groundlings had gone home for the night. Malachite was waiting for Moon to set off their groundlings’ ambush, but since the actual targets were here now, Moon wanted to let _them_ go spring it.

The only problem was, he hadn’t realized the second of the two prey groundlings hadn’t gone up to the roof with the first until Moon was already inside the roof stairwell and only found one of their scents, barely noticeable under the thick oily stink of the ambushing groundlings. So he’d shifted and jumped up to cling to the wall above the door, where his black scales blended into the deep shadows, and held his breath while the second prey groundling walked directly beneath him, looked around, and climbed up the stairs.

Moon could only just make out their voices over the annoyingly loud buzzing of machinery in the space at the top of the stairs. He didn’t understand their language - he and Malachite had quickly discovered that wherever they were, no one spoke any of the six or so languages they knew between them - but from their hushed tones, it was clear they knew they were being hunted. Moon half-expected them to turn around and leave, but they were either very stupid or very confident: they only talked for a moment before their footsteps clomped across the floor away from the stairwell. A door creaked open, bringing with it a blast of cold wind and city-stench, then closed again.

Moon dropped down from the wall and shifted. His groundling form blended in well enough, and while there hadn’t been any sign of Fell in the city other than Consolation, Moon didn’t want to start a panic if anyone saw his winged form. Malachite could take down their groundlings without being seen, and Moon could deal with the prey groundlings in his own groundling form.

His feet silent on the cold stone steps, he slipped up the stairs and out to the roof.

* * *

Despite the confidence he’d shown Sam when declaring they would spring the trap, Dean felt unease curl in his gut as he walked out onto the open roof. They didn’t know what their baddies were, which meant they couldn’t be sure where the attack would come from or what form it would take. He stayed close to Sam, both of them leading their movements with their guns, as they moved away from the stairwell.

The roof was flat and covered with miscellaneous small debris, twigs and leaves and other bits that had been carried up here by wind and storms. Huge HVAC pipes and fan cases jutted out here and there, providing plenty of hiding spots for their ambushers, plus the big shack that held the stairwell. A low wall ran around the very edge of the building, not more than knee height and useless for preventing someone from falling. A chill wind blasted them; forty floors was more than enough height to put them above most buildings in the city, and there was nothing to block the gusts. The only light came from the glow of the city below, and the distant lamps illuminating the Key Tower overhead.

Sam nudged Dean with an elbow. When Dean glanced up at him, he raised an eyebrow and tilted his head out toward the roof, where presumably their quarry was hiding. Dean considered, then shrugged - it wasn’t as though anybody was fooling anybody.

Sam called out across the roof, “Johan Wood? Benjamin Valencia? We just want to talk.”

Senses heightened by a year in Purgatory told Dean that something was moving behind them. He pivoted, putting his back against Sam’s, squinting into the dim light. “C’mon,” he called, and didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm. “We’re all friends here, right?”

There was a whooshing sound, like giant wings, and Dean spun around. For an instant he thought he saw something big and dark in the far corner of the roof; then movement by one of the HVAC pipes to his right caught his eye. A man stepped out of the shadows, his pale skin and blond hair gleaming in the reflected light. Dean grunted a warning to Sam and turned when his brother did, so that Sam was facing the guy and Dean was watching his back.

“Benjamin Valencia,” Sam said. “Your secretary said you were waiting for us up here.”

“We were,” the man - Valencia - said. “Though we weren’t expecting the Winchesters themselves to show up. Last we heard, you died when you took down Dick Roman.”

Dean flinched despite himself, remembering the shock of the explosion when he’d stabbed the leader of the Leviathan, the greater shock of finding himself in Purgatory with only Cas by his side. Careful not to take his eyes off the roof where he was certain Valencia’s partners were sneaking into position, he said, “Sorry to disappoint.”

“Disappoint?” Valencia repeated, oily surprise in his voice. “Oh, no, Winchester. We’re _thrilled._ Not only are we about to install a brand-new leader right under your incompetent noses, we get to take revenge for your murder of our old leader.”

“What?” Sam said, but it was already falling into place for Dean - black blood in the warehouse, people going missing and turning back up like nothing had happened, the reference to Dick Roman.

Purgatory-honed reflexes kicked in and he was diving to the side almost before he knew it, knocking Sam down with him as something leaped from the top of the stairwell shack. He knew that godawful hissing noise, didn’t need to see the rows of needle teeth surrounding a gaping maw to scream, “ _Leviathan!_ ”

Sam grunted as he hit the roof and rolled to his feet; Dean didn’t have time to make sure he was okay because another of the goddamn things was already charging at him from behind a fan housing. Dean shot it three times in the chest, which threw off its stride long enough for Dean to break away from Sam and get his back against a pipe. The one that had jumped them from above had gone after Sam, along with the one masquerading as Benjamin Valencia, and gunfire rang out across the rooftop as Sam unloaded his clip into the first one’s head.

Three more were rushing Dean now and he didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time for anything but fighting. He emptied his own gun into the throat of the closest, all but severing its head; dropped the empty weapon and yanked out his Purgatory blade. The two remaining Leviathan reached him and he ducked under the first one’s grasp, slicing upward and severing its hands at the wrist. As it fell back, howling in agony, Dean straightened and decapitated the second. Black blood spattered the roof as its body fell to the ground, and for a second Dean had breathing room.

He used the time to glance across the roof to where Sam was grappling with Valencia and trying to avoid two more attempting to pin him down. Dean ran to help, cursing under his breath - just how many of the damn things were up here?! But the one whose hands he’d cut off had other ideas: it lunged for him, massive jaw snapping, and its needle teeth closed around his elbow.

Dean shouted in pain and swung his blade, severing its neck, but the damn thing’s jaws didn’t open and he had to waste several precious seconds prying it off. Blood dripped from his elbow and pain screamed up his arm through his shoulder when he moved it, but his arm wasn’t broken and it would just have to work for a living. Sticking his blade under his arm, he reloaded his gun as he started toward his brother. The other two he’d decapitated were already beginning to re-form, black ooze bubbling across the surface of the roof to reconnect bodies with heads. At best he’d have only a minute to help Sam.

A low _fwoosh_ echoed across the roof and Dean turned in time to see one of the Leviathan harrassing Sam fall back screaming, its entire head on fire. Dean could just make out the casing of a lighter stuck on one of its teeth, then Sam lunged forward and jammed a lit road flare down its throat. The fire roared up and the Leviathan collapsed, writhing in agony. But Sam had two others on him and even as Dean ran toward him, three more appeared from the shadows and lunged for him.

“ _Sam!_ ” Dean yelled. He flung himself at the nearest Leviathan, his Purgatory blade ripping a line down its spine. Sam spun away from the new attackers, but that put him dangerously close to Valencia - and dangerously close to the edge of the roof. Dean swore and yanked his blade free, knocking the flailing creature down and stomping its stupid toothy face into the asphalt surface. He dodged the grasping hands of the next one and tried to decapitate the third. It jerked back and though his blade opened its throat, spraying a geyser of black ooze all over Dean, its head remained attached.

At the edge of the roof Sam had finally managed to draw his own machete and had hacked off the head of one of his attackers. But even as he turned to square off with the second, Valencia lunged for Sam’s back.

Dean shouted, but his own crew of assholes was blocking his path and there was no way he could get to Sam in time—

The mystery guy from the hallway darted out from behind a pipe and slammed into Valencia, knocking him away from Sam toward the edge of the roof. Dean breathed a sigh of relief - Sam could handle the ones in front of him, and whoever the mystery guy was, he seemed intent on shoving Valencia over the edge of the roof rather than attacking Sam.

But Valencia wasn’t going down that easily. He planted his feet, braced his heel against the low wall at the edge of the roof, and flipped the mystery man over the edge instead. The guy twisted like a cat in midair, apparently less concerned about the fact that he was about to fall forty stories than he was with grabbing Valencia by the arm. He hauled on Valencia as he dropped, clearly determined to take Valencia down with him. Valencia’s knees hit the wall and he staggered, tripping backward over the wall off the roof, the mystery man’s weight pulling him down—

—and at the last second he flung out a hand and snagged Sam by the back of the jacket.

For an instant Dean thought Sam would be okay, would shrug out of the jacket or brace himself or _something_ , but Sam had been leaning back to dodge a bite from another Leviathan and was already off-balance. His legs hit the wall and he flipped over it, plunging down to the street hundreds of feet below.

“SAM!” Dean screamed.

He had no memory of the next few seconds, his body operating on pure autopilot to tear through the remaining Leviathan between him and where Sam had gone off the edge of the roof. Dean dropped to his knees beside the wall and leaned over it, praying to any angel or demon or freaking djinn that would listen that he’d see Sam clinging by his fingertips to the side of the building where Dean could reach down and grab him. His mind played the memory of Cas falling away from the portal out of Purgatory, over and over again on a loop, he couldn’t lose Sam too, not like that, not both of them—

But Sam wasn’t there. The floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the building’s top floor provided no handholds, nothing to grab onto, and on the street far below traffic was coming to a screeching halt around a bloody smear on the pavement.

“No,” Dean whispered. “No, no, _no—!_ ”

Something hissed behind him and he attacked without thinking, blade slicing through a neck, moving on to the next before the head even thumped down to the roof. Sliced through that one, too, and the next, some of them still with oozing lines across their throats where they’d reattached their heads once already. He didn’t realize he was screaming in rage and grief until he ran out of air and had to stop, chest heaving, but breathing hardly mattered when Sam was _dead_. Killed by Leviathan, and all Dean could think was how he’d berated Sam for quitting the hunting life. If Sam hadn’t quit, would he have died like this before Dean even made it back? Or had he died like this because he’d quit, had fallen out of practice?

_No._

It was too much to think about, too much to deal with so soon after losing Cas, too. Dean shut off his brain, shut off the little voice at the back of his head screaming _your fault, your fault, he never wanted to hunt and you made him and now he’s dead because of you_. Threw himself at the Leviathan, hardly caring that they were putting themselves back together as fast as he sliced them apart; not thinking at all except _these fuckers killed Sammy._ He’d kill them as many times as it took, until the roof ran black with Leviathan blood, until they overwhelmed him and killed him too. _Watch out for Sammy_.

_Sorry, Dad_ , Dean thought. Teeth sank into his arms, his legs, the tough denim no match for Leviathan teeth. _Sorry, Sammy_ —

Gunshots rang out across the roof and the Leviathan tearing into him jerked, falling away. Someone yelled, “Dean!”

Sam’s voice.

Dean spun around, hacking off the head of a Leviathan that didn’t get out of his way fast enough, scanning the roof. Sam yelled his name again; this time Dean realized it was coming from overhead, and looked up in time to see—

_Holy shit._

In time to see a big, black-scaled creature land on the roof some twenty feet away with Sam in its arms. Relief at seeing Sam alive battled with the shock of seeing the creature: it was at least seven feet tall, with broad scaled wings, a tail tipped with a sharp-edged spade, enormous raptor-like talons on its feet, and a thick mane of spines and frills running from its head halfway down its back. Dean had no idea what the hell it was or why it was here, but it was holding Sam and he swung his gun up, aiming past Sam’s head at the creature.

“Dean, no!” Sam yelled. He squirmed out of the creature’s grip and dropped to the ground in front of it, arms spread. “He saved me!”

“What. The. Hell,” Dean growled without lowering his gun, “Is. That. Thing?”

“Dammit, Dean,” Sam said. “Put the gun down.” He didn’t move from where he stood in front of the creature. It hadn’t moved either, and while Dean couldn’t make out its expression very well between the darkness of the rooftop and its black scales, he got the impression it was annoyed.

Which was just dandy, because Dean was annoyed, too. “Why should I?” he demanded. He’d watched his little brother fall to his death - almost - and been chewed on by half a dozen Leviathan—

Wait a minute. Where were the Leviathan?

Dean blinked, unease curling in his gut as he glanced around for the small army of needle-toothed maws that had been chomping on him all of twenty seconds ago. But the rooftop was quiet. He spotted a few bodies and heads - separated but slowly oozing back toward one another - but nowhere near as many as there ought to be. Dean certainly hadn’t killed them all. He turned back to Sam and the creature, intending to demand answers—

Where the hell was his gun?

Even as he thought it, his brain belatedly supplied an image of a muscular green-scaled arm reaching from behind him and plucking the gun from his hands. Unease exploded into fear and he spun around.

The first thing he registered was how _big_ the second creature was. Easily nine feet tall, broad enough through the shoulders to make Sam look like a malnourished twig, she looked like she could bench-press a Honda. Her scales were dark in the shadows, overlayed with a spiderweb of silvery scars, and her spines ran all the way down her back to her tail. She was clearly female; like the male she wore no clothes, but she did have silver and crystal sheaths on her claws - the same claws in which she held Dean’s gun. It looked like a child’s toy in her hand, but she appeared entirely unamused by it.

“That’s why,” Sam said dryly from behind him.

Dean flipped him the bird.


	4. Chapter 4

The massive female…. dragon? Sam wasn’t really sure what to call them; they looked nothing like the dragons he and Dean had faced in San Francisco a couple of years back, but they looked more like dragons than those things had. Whatever they were, the female had torn effortlessly through the Leviathan, ripping off their heads and tossing the pieces far enough apart that they couldn’t immediately pull themselves back together. Sam had watched her do it even as Dean had threatened the male dragon-thing, but somehow his mind hadn’t registered it at the time. Pulling up the memory was uncomfortably like trying to access the memories from the time his soulless body had been walking around without him: distant and hazy.

Dean was still staring up at her, and Sam didn’t need to see his brother’s face to know he was gaping like a fish. Not that Sam could blame him, but on the other hand, Sam was pretty sure these things were friendly - or at least not actively hostile - and he wanted to keep it that way. He looked up at the female over Dean’s head. “Uh, thanks,” he said, and nodded toward the scattered Leviathan bits.

The female didn’t react, didn’t so much as twitch. She was watching Dean with the expression of someone who was debating whether to step on an annoying ant or let it escape, and Sam started to worry. He took a cautious step forward and to the side, trying to move to where he could see both of the creatures at the same time. “So, uh, who are you guys, anyway?”

The male looked between Sam and the female, then made a clearly exasperated sound. A couple of his spines flicked, and though the female didn’t otherwise move, her eyes shifted to watch him. It was apparently permission or agreement of some kind, because the male settled his wings, met Sam’s eyes - and then dissolved into a smoky black blur for a moment before re-forming into the strangely-dressed mystery man who’d knocked Valencia off the roof.

Sam nodded acknowledgement. He’d suspected as much - he’d been too busy flailing for a handhold to notice the man shapechange when they’d fallen off the building, but it wasn’t that difficult a guess.

The man said something in a language Sam didn’t recognize, still holding Sam’s gaze. Sam shook his head, and tried, “Español? Deutsche? Uh… Nihongo?”

The man mimicked Sam’s headshake, then said a few more things which all sounded different and which Sam suspected were his version of Sam’s attempts at different languages. When Sam didn’t recognize any of them, the man pressed his lips together in frustration, his gaze flicking past Sam to the female. She still hadn’t moved, though Dean had apparently gotten tired of having his back to Sam and the man because he was edging awkwardly sideways, clearly trying to keep an eye on the female.

The man spoke to the female, longer, and Sam was fluent in five languages and had a passing familiarity with another six or seven, but none of them sounded like this. There were odd growls and clicks and weirdly modulated vowels, sounds not meant to be made with purely human vocal cords.

The female listened, then flicked a single spine. That apparently meant something because the male turned back to Sam and spoke more, gesturing this time in broad, exaggerated motions.

Dean had managed to edge over to Sam’s side. “What’s he saying?”

“That they’re hunting Leviathan, I think,” Sam said. The man kept gesturing, and Sam added, “I… think they want to work with us?”

Dean threw him an incredulous glance. “Wait, we’re just skipping straight to working with them?” he demanded. “With the scary dragon people we have to play Charades with?”

“You asked me what he said,” Sam shot back. Put that way, it did sound stupid. “Although I do think I know a way around the language barrier. But we’d have to go back to the motel.”

“Goody,” Dean said. “We take the scary dragon people back to our motel and then, what, fight Leviathan with them?”

“Why not?” Sam said. “They’re doing a better job killing them than us.”

Dean grunted and turned away, which was Winchester for _I’m not going to admit you’re right but do what you want_. Sam rolled his eyes at his brother’s back, then turned to the male, who was watching them intently, clearly trying to gauge their reactions. Catching his eye, Sam said, “We, uh, we need to go back to our motel—” gesturing as he did, trying to convey the message with what he hoped were universal signs— “and if you come with us, we can maybe talk about this.”

The male’s head tilted, his green eyes unnervingly sharp, like a hawk fixing on a rabbit in the moment before stooping. Sam hoped like hell his hand signs had worked; there was no way these two dragon-people weren’t the ones who’d stolen the cows from Scotts’ Adventure Farm, and Sam really wanted to find out what their deal was and why they were hunting Leviathan.

Sirens wailed in the distance; someone must have called the police for the guy who’d fallen off the building. They didn’t have much time to get out of here unnoticed. The male apparently realized this too, because he made an odd sort of shrugging gesture, then spoke again, rapidly, his hands making a similar set of motions as Sam’s had. Confirming that he would go with them, as best Sam could tell.

“Great,” Sam said, and grinned at him. The male smiled back, and it took Sam a second to realize the expression looked odd because he was making an effort not to show teeth. _Creepy._

“What about these guys?” Dean asked, and motioned to the scattered bodies of the Leviathan around them. “We leave ‘em here, they’ll Dry Bones themselves back together by morning. Or the cops’ll find ‘em when they come up to investigate.”

The male had followed Dean’s gesture, and now he spoke again, pointing behind them. Sam had an instant of confusion before he remembered the female - somehow, in the minute they’d been focused on the male, he’d managed to forget about her presence entirely. It was unsettling as hell - reality had been a tenuous thing before Castiel had taken the remnants of Lucifer out of Sam’s soul a year and a half ago, and there were still weeks when Sam wasn’t entirely sure what was real. But Dean jerked and swore when he turned to the female, so he’d forgotten about her, too.

Maybe it was just something the dragon-people could do, some kind of notice-me-not aura that helped keep vanilla humans from seeing them. Sam dug his thumb into the old scar on his palm anyway, and tried not to see Dean’s expression when he noticed.

The female didn’t seem to care about their surprise; she just stared at the male with that flat, unimpressed look. He said something else, and finally she flicked a spine again. Turning back to Sam and Dean, the male gestured some more, indicating that the female would deal with the Leviathan. Sam had no idea what that entailed, but that was why they needed to go to the motel. Once they solved the language barrier, he could just _ask_ , instead of playing Charades.

“Okay,” he said, and nodded acknowledgement. “Then let’s go.” He motioned as he spoke, back toward the door downstairs, and the male moved when Sam and Dean did.

They made it down from the roof and all the way to the lobby before Dean stopped abruptly, patting his pockets, then swore. “That bitch still has my gun!”

The male stopped, too, his head cocked as he watched Dean. Sam grabbed his brother’s arm and dragged him forward. “Leave it,” he muttered.

“But—”

“We can get it back later,” Sam said. “ _After_ we’ve figured out how to talk to them.”

Dean stopped again, eyes darting back toward where the male had begun to follow them again. Despite the fact that all evidence indicated he couldn’t understand them, Dean spoke in a bare whisper. “I might, y’know, _need_ it.”

“You have ten more in the trunk,” Sam pointed out.

“So?”

Sam rolled his eyes and hauled on Dean’s arm until he started moving. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Putting together a spell with the dragon-man watching was a little like the time Sam had tried to fix a cabinet in Amelia’s veterinary clinic while her latest patients, a pair of cats, prowled around. The guy never got in the way, but he was obviously curious and didn’t have the same sense of personal space as a human. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t have _any_ sense of personal space: Sam noticed the guy was careful to never turn his back on Sam, or Dean either where he was perched on the edge of one of the beds bandaging the various Leviathan bites he’d taken on the roof. Even when the guy was leaning in to watch Sam grind spell ingredients in a bowl, he kept a cautious distance. It was like working near an exceptionally wary cat.

Still, Sam was glad when he finished mixing the powder concoction and drawing the ritual circle in chalk on the motel carpet. He’d tried to explain what he was doing, but “magic spell to share languages” was not an easy concept to convey via hand gestures. Especially not when Sam only half-understood how the spell worked - it was one he’d found more than a year ago while they were going through the remnants of Bobby’s library, looking for ways to stop Leviathan. It hadn’t been useful then, but Sam had bookmarked it for later. After they’d killed Dick Roman, Sam hadn’t thought there would _be_ a later, but now Dean was back - was _alive_ , which Sam still had trouble believing sometimes - and so were the Leviathan. Sam was just glad he’d never gotten around to donating Bobby’s books to a collector like he’d planned.

He stepped into the circle and motioned for the dragon-man to join him. The guy eyed him warily, but finally made that odd shrugging motion and stepped over the line. Sam glanced over his shoulder at the spellbook propped on the edge of the bed, committing the words of the spell to memory. Then he lit a match, dropped it into the bowl of powder, and begain chanting. Magic tingled over his skin, and the dragon-man hissed in surprise. Smoke erupted from the bowl, swirling around them, then the magic surged and the smoke evaporated in a flash of blinding light.

Sam shook his head, trying to blink the spots from his eyes. He had no idea if that was supposed to happen, whether the spell had gone off properly—

“Did it work?” the dragon-man asked.

Oh. “Looks like,” Sam said. The words felt odd on his tongue - he wasn’t speaking English, he was speaking the growly, yowling dragon-people language. “You all right?” 

The guy made a rolling motion with his neck and shoulders. “Fine. That was… strange.” He stepped out of the circle, ignoring Dean, who was staring at them both in consernation.

“Sorry,” Sam said. “I’ve never done that spell before.”

“Hey,” Dean interjected irritably. “I thought this was going to let _him_ speak English, not _you_ speak… whatever.”

“Raksuran,” the guy supplied, then added in English, “It did both.”

Sam rolled his eyes at his brother, then said to the guy, “My name is Sam Winchester. This is my brother Dean, who forgets about things like _manners_.”

The guy’s eyes crinkled at the corners in a slight smile. “I’m Moon,” he answered. His name sounded strange, the spell translating the word in Sam’s head even though the phonemes meant nothing in English. “First consort of the Court of Indigo Cloud.”

“Nice to meet you,” Sam said, and smiled back, careful not to show teeth. Moon had consistently avoided doing so, and Sam wanted to avoid any kind of potentially threatening faux pas. “So, you’re a…”

“Raksura,” Moon said, which didn’t explain anything, but he didn’t seem inclined to clarify further. “What are you?”

“Human,” Dean said.

Sam shot him a glance, but his voice had been neutral enough and he didn’t seem about to make any undiplomatic comments. Just in case, though, Sam decided to change the subject. “So you guys are hunting Leviathan, too?”

“Leviathan,” Moon repeated thoughtfully. Like Moon’s name, the word didn’t seem to have translated. “We thought they might be some kind of Fell half-breed.”

“Fell?” Dean asked. “What’s a Fell?”

Moon eyed him. “You don’t have Fell here?”

“No,” Sam said. “At least, I don’t think so. What are they?”

“Shapeshifters,” Moon explained, a hard edge to his voice that suggested unwanted familiarity. “They lie and trick their way into groundling villages, taking over the minds of the leaders, then once they have everything they want they destroy the village and eat the groundlings.”

“Groundlings as in, people?” Dean asked. At Moon’s nod, he continued, “That sounds like Leviathan all right. They can take over people’s bodies, or just take their shape, and they eat people.”

“The Fell can’t put themselves back together like your Leviathan can, though,” Moon said. “If you cut off a Fell’s head, it stays dead.”

Sam nodded. “Why are you hunting Leviathan?”

Moon’s sharp green gaze fixed on Sam, and he didn’t answer for a long second. Then, sounding almost reluctant, he said, “They stole Consolation.” _Consolation_ came out in Raksuran, the translation only in Sam’s head just like _Moon_ had been, which was what let Sam guess it was another name. “She’s a half-Fell queen. We don’t know what they want with her, but it’s too dangerous to let them keep her.”

“Half Fell, half…?” Dean said.

“Raksura,” Moon said flatly. The muscles of his shoulders and neck twitched, everything in his posture conveying that this was a topic he did not want to discuss. Which Sam could understand - if Leviathan somehow managed to create a half-human crossbreed, he’d be disturbed by the concept too.

“Okay,” Sam said carefully. “Why don’t you start from the beginning? Where you guys came from, how Leviathan stole Consolation, what you’ve found so far.”

Again Moon didn’t answer right away, and Sam got the impression he was weighing how much to tell them. Finally he said, “We were in the Reaches. A hole opened up in the ground and dropped us - Consolation, Malachite, and me - into a big building, maybe a warehouse. Probably the hole was some kind of portal spell, like the foundation builders’ flying city.”

Sam opened his mouth to ask about that but Moon kept talking, either not noticing or - more likely - deliberately ignoring him. “Your Leviathan were ready for Consolation and caught her,” Moon said, “but Malachite kept them from seeing me or her. They took Consolation away in a box, and we’ve been trying to find her ever since.” He wrinkled his nose. “There’s too many scents in this city, though, and it’s taking too long to search without knowing the language or the culture.”

The explanation raised more questions than it answered, but the way Moon had barreled over Sam’s attempt to interrupt suggested he wouldn’t be inclined to answer most of those new questions. “Malachite is the other Raksura?” Sam tried instead. “The dark green one?”

Moon nodded. “She’s the reigning queen of Opal Night. She’s responsible for Consolation.”

“Hang on,” Dean interrupted. “You said you landed in a warehouse?” He shot Sam a pointed look. “Didn’t Detective Carmichael say something about a weird crime scene in a warehouse?”

“Right,” Sam said thoughtfully. “He said it was covered in black goo that was also human blood.”

“Leviathan blood,” Moon said. “We killed six of them. Or at least, we ripped them apart and buried the heads, then dropped the bodies in the big lake.” Something must have shown on Sam or Dean’s faces because Moon added, sounding vaguely exasperated, “It’s what you do for Fell rulers. The Leviathan kept putting themselves back together, and it was the best thing we could think of.”

Dean pursed his lips and tilted his head, ceding the point.

“You took their wallets,” Sam guessed, “and then, when you took the cattle from Scott’s Farm, you left the wallets behind as payment.”

“You people have weird payment systems.” Moon shrugged. “It was easier than trying to figure out how to use the money.”

“What did you need two cows for, though?” Dean asked.

Moon fixed him with a flat look. “Food.”

Dean looked him up and down, disbelief plain in his expression. Moon was tall even in this form, sure, as tall as Sam - but he was slender to the point of being delicate. “You needed two entire cows?”

Moon smirked, still without showing teeth. “We were hungry.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “That solves all our mysteries, though,” he pointed out. “Leviathan is responsible for the disappearance of all those people a few weeks ago - that would’ve been when they moved in and took over. A couple of them got caught, so they killed the people who caught them. They came here to kidnap Consolation for whatever reason, ended up pulling Moon and Malachite with her, and didn’t realize it. Moon and Malachite killed six Leviathan in the warehouse, then stole the cows for food. Then we showed up and started asking questions, making Leviathan nervous enough to set up an ambush on top of Erieview Tower.”

“Damn,” Dean muttered. “Shoulda been werewolves. We know how to kill werewolves.”

“Oh,” Sam said, and looked over at Dean with a grin. Dean blinked at him, confused, and Sam held out a hand pointedly. After a moment, Dean caught on, rolled his eyes, and pulled out his wallet. The twenty he slapped into Sam’s palm came with perhaps a little more force than necessary, but that was older brothers for you.

Moon watched the exchange skeptically, but didn’t question it; all he said was, “We still don’t know why they stole Consolation.”

Dean snapped his fingers. “They want to make her their leader.”

Sam and Moon both stared at him. Dean said to Sam, “Remember, on the roof, that Valencia guy said they were about to install a new leader?”

Sam blinked. He’d forgotten about that, but now that Dean pointed it out…

“That doesn’t make sense,” Moon protested. “Leviathan and Fell might sound similar, but they aren’t the same. Why would they make a half-Fell queen who’s barely more than a fledgeling into their new leader?”

“They’re Leviathan,” Dean said. “They’re freaks who’ve been stuffed in Purgatory since the beginning of time. Who knows what they think makes sense? Anyway, do _you_ have a better idea?”

Moon’s shoulders twitched slightly. “Even the Fell have reasons for what they do,” he said. “Even if the reason is just ‘they’re sadistic bastards who like to mess with people before they eat them’. But I can’t see a reason for going to all the trouble of pulling someone from the Reaches to… wherever this is, to make her their leader, especially if she’s not even one of them.”

“Cleveland,” Sam said, and when Moon blinked at him, clarified, “Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where we are. You mentioned the Reaches before - where is that, exactly?”

“In the west,” Moon said, then seemed to realize how unhelpful that was, because he added, “Far west of the Turning City; west of the wetlands; southwest of the Yellow Sea; south of Imperial Kish; and east of the Freshwater Sea.”

Sam shook his head. “I don’t know any of those places.”

Moon’s shoulders twitched again, and in trying to parse the motion Sam abruptly remembered Moon’s dragon form, and the mane of long spines and frills that ran down his back. Moon and Malachite both had used flicks of those spines as body language or communication of some kind, and Moon’s shoulder twitches were probably the version of that which carried through to his human form. Not that Sam had any way to understand what they meant.

Moon said, “I don’t think there’s anyplace like this city in all of the Three Worlds.”

“Uh,” Dean said. “Three Worlds?”

Moon pointed down at the ground, then off to the side, presumably toward Lake Erie. “Ground. Sea.” Pointed up. “Sky. Three worlds. I’ve traveled a lot, and even I haven’t ever heard of a city like… _this_.” His eyes fixed on Dean. “You said the Leviathan are from somewhere else, not this world. Maybe we are, too.”

“Purgatory isn’t really another world, though,” Dean said. “I mean, it sort of is, but it’s…” He threw up his hands and turned to Sam for help.

But Sam was remembering a year and a half ago, Balthazar’s spell that had carried them to a strange world with no magic and a television show called _Supernatural._ “Maybe it’s not quite as big a leap of logic as it sounds,” he admitted.

“At best,” Moon said, “we’re on the opposite side of the world, somewhere across the Saltwater Deeps. But the kinds of things you people have in this city, the boats, the airships…” He did that shrugging gesture, his fingers flicking absently. “I find it hard to believe your people wouldn’t have made it across the Deeps by now. And I’ve seen what the forerunners and the foundation builders could do. A portal to a whole different world wouldn’t be _that_ unbelievable.”

Sam firmly pushed thoughts of flying dragon-people appearing alongside the windows of airplanes taking off from the Cleveland airport out of his head. They could ask Detective Carmichael later, but it wasn’t relevant to the issue at hand. “I think we need to get a look at that warehouse,” Sam said. “It’s where Leviathan opened the portal - they might have left some other stuff behind. Something we can use to figure out what their plan is, why they want Consolation.”

“Won’t the cops have cleaned it up by now?” Dean asked. “It’s been a few days.”

“We’ll find out,” Sam said. “If we have to, we can get the crime scene photos from Carmichael.” He turned back to Moon. “We’ll go in the morning - it’s been a long day, we could all use the rest.”

For a second Moon looked like he was going to argue, but then he turned away. “Fine.”

“You’re welcome to stay here if you want—” Sam said, but Moon was already across the room and pulling open the door.

“Or not,” Sam finished lamely. Hurrying after Moon out into the parking lot, he called, “How do we find you?”

Moon, already halfway around the corner of the motel into the darkened area along its end, paused and glanced back. His eyes gleamed in the building’s flourescent lighting. “We’ll be back at dawn.” Then he slipped around the corner. A moment later Sam felt the faintest brush of air and saw a darker shape rise up past the roof and vanish into the night sky.

* * *

It wasn’t until Sam said, “What?” that Dean realized he’d been staring at his kid brother where he sat on the other bed, laptop on his knees, screen flickering as he browsed. Dean dropped his head, making himself look instead at the Purgatory blade he’d been turning over in his hands. He thought he’d been polishing it at some point, but the rag he’d been using sat forgotten on the floor between his feet, and the blade shone in the dim motel lamp-light like obsidian.

“Dean,” Sam said again. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Dean said. It came out too sharp, Purgatory memories in his voice ( _Castiel falling_ ), and Sam winced. Dean forced himself to put the blade down and ran his hand over his mouth. “Nothing,” he repeated. But it wasn’t nothing and they both knew it, so finally he said, “You fell off the goddamn roof, Sam.”

“And?” Sam said. He waved a hand, then cut the gesture short when Dean twitched. “I’m fine,” Sam said.

“You almost weren’t,” Dean growled. “If that dragon-guy hadn’t been there…”

“People die in this business, Dean,” Sam said. His voice was tight, and another memory hit Dean, standing in the cabin last month where they’d reunited, Sam saying _what we do is the thing that got every single member of my family killed._

Dean pushed the memory aside, hard. “ _People_ die,” he said. “ _Winchesters_ don’t.” Sam should have known that ( _could have saved Cas if he’d remembered that, and then it wouldn’t be Dean’s fault that Cas fell_ ).

Sam looked away, his jaw going tight in that way Dean had missed every second he was trapped in Purgatory, the way that meant Sam was about to be a stubborn ass and pick a fight. But Sam didn’t say anything, the silence stretching through the room, itching under Dean’s skin. He wanted Sam to get angry, wanted him to pick a fight so that Dean could yell at him, could _fight_ the way he’d spent the last year doing, nothing but fighting and running and fighting some more. The purity of it had been a relief after a year of hiding from Leviathan, a year of not knowing who they could trust, a year of loss after loss after loss. 

But Sam had changed while Dean was trapped in Purgatory. Sam had hit a dog and met a girl and now he wouldn’t pick a fight, and Dean didn’t know how to reach him anymore. Sam flicked a glance at him from the corner of his eye, then sighed and closed the laptop, his face tired and drawn. “Get some sleep, Dean,” he said quietly. Without waiting for an answer, he turned off the light and rolled over, curling under the blanket with his back to Dean.

It was a long time before Dean could unclench his fists, and when he finally closed his eyes to try to sleep, all he could see was Sam and Cas, falling over and over and over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the most interesting things about researching this fic was realizing just how blase Moon, and the other well-traveled Raksura, are about strange environments, cultures, and technologies. Moon doesn't bat an eye at the apparently magic-driven floating bus things near the end of _Harbors of the Sun_ , and none of the Raksura express surprise or amazement at the various non-flame light sources and other magitech used by societies around the Three Worlds. So I had a lot less "Moon and Malachite flailing around modern-day Cleveland" than I was expecting.


	5. Chapter 5

“If you didn’t want to ally with them,” Moon said, exasperated, “you should have said so last night.”

Malachite didn’t respond. She hadn’t been impressed by Moon’s explanation of the situation with the Winchesters, but then, Malachite wasn’t impressed by much of anything. They were crouched atop the tall boxy building next to the one where Moon had left the Winchesters last night, hunched low against the roof as the first rays of dawn lit up the city. They’d spent the night up here, after Moon had rejoined Malachite as she finished disposing of the Leviathan. Apparently the heads they’d buried a few days ago were missing, presumably due to the creatures putting their bodies back together, and it had made her even crankier than normal for a Raksuran queen.

Right now, she was glaring down at the empty paved area in front of the building as though it was personally responsible for them being yanked into some bizarre other-world where they had to ally with strange groundlings to rescue a half-Fell queen. When she continued to not respond, Moon rolled his eyes. “I’m going to let them know we’re ready,” he said, and bounded off the roof to the ground alongside the building before she could object. He shifted to groundling before coming around the corner into the open paved area; there were no groundlings around that he could see, but the many curtained windows looking over the pavement made him nervous.

Stopping in front of the Winchesters’ door, Moon banged twice on it with a fist. Through the thin walls he heard a startled yelp, then a voice rough with sleep and surprise: “Jeez, I didn’t think he meant literal dawn!” He thought it was Dean, the shorter and more skeptical one.

A moment later the other brother, whose lighter voice didn’t match the breadth of his chest, answered. “He said dawn, what else would he have meant?” A lock clicked and the door opened, revealing Sam Winchester. His hair was damp and he smelled like soap and the odd mineral scent of the water here. “Hey,” Sam said. “We’re just getting ready.”

Moon leaned past him to look inside. Dean Winchester was rolling off one of the two beds, his face creased from having been pressed into the pillow. He shot Moon a glare worthy of River being kicked out of his favorite sunning spot. “Ten minutes,” he grumbled, and vanished into the tiny bathing room.

Sam rolled his eyes at Moon and smiled. “He’s not a morning person.”

Moon didn’t answer; Dean had nothing on Stone in the morning. Instead Moon pulled Dean’s shooting weapon, the one Malachite had taken from him last night on the roof, from the sash around his waist and held it out to Sam. Sam’s eyebrows went up, but he accepted the weapon carefully, checking it over before setting it inside an open bag sitting on the room’s tiny table.

He’d apparently been packing the bag when Moon arrived, and strange weapons and jars and other implements poked out of it haphazardly. Moon leaned in cautiously. The scent of explosive powder and heavy metal hung around the Winchesters like a cloud, which was no surprise given the weapons they’d used last night. The bag was packed with more of those shooting weapons of varying shapes, as well as several sharp blades, and… Moon frowned, baffled.

“Borax squirt guns,” Sam said from behind him. Moon slid aside as Sam reached into the bag and pulled out one of several brightly-colored, bulbous shooting weapons filled with a sharp-smelling liquid. He held it out for Moon to see. “We don’t know why, but borax hurts Leviathan,” Sam explained. “Doesn’t kill ‘em, but it’ll slow them down, at least.”

Whatever _borax_ was, it didn’t translate in Moon’s head like the rest of Sam’s words. He asked, “Is it poison?”

“It’s a mineral,” Sam said. “It can be poisonous in the right concentrations, but mostly it’s a cleaning solution, used for—”

“Don’t get him started,” Dean said, emerging from the bathing room. He’d changed into clean clothes and scrubbed his face, and looked considerably more awake. “He’s a nerd, he’ll talk your ear off.”

“Shut up,” Sam said, and swatted at him.

Dean dodged easily. “Bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam retorted.

Moon resisted the urge to hiss at them. As much as they looked and sounded like Raksuran warriors, they weren’t, and he didn’t want to get too comfortable with them. He needed to focus on finding Consolation and figuring out how to get home. He and Malachite had been in this place for four days already, and Jade and Chime and the others would be absolutely frantic. Not to mention all the problems that would be caused by their disappearance from Opal Night’s territory on what was supposed to have been a friendly visit, while the half-Fell flight was present. Jade’s relationship with Onyx, Malachite’s sister queen, was distant at best; they’d barely interacted during the visit. Moon had no idea whether they’d be capable of working together to do... whatever they might be trying to do on their side.

Moon shook himself, shrugging his shoulders to settle spines he didn’t have in this form. Whatever was going on with Jade and the others back in the Reaches, Moon couldn’t do anything about it until he got back himself. Which meant finding Consolation and the Leviathan who took her, which meant working with the Winchesters.

Sam was just closing the big bag, the strange liquid weapon safely packed away inside, while Dean was hauling on his boots. Moon followed Sam outside, waiting while he slung the bag into the back compartment of their strange vehicle and unlocked the doors.

“So, uh,” Sam asked as he pulled open the door. “Is Malachite here?” He looked around uneasily, as if expecting her to appear out of nowhere. Which wouldn’t be that unusual, for Malachite.

“She’ll follow us,” Moon said. Sam frowned at him, and Moon gave him a blank look in return. The Winchesters’ vehicle wasn’t that big, and even if Malachite would have willingly subjected herself to the indignity of riding in it, she probably wouldn’t have fit even in her smaller Arbora form. Moon hadn’t been especially fond of his own trip in it last night. It wasn’t the worst groundling conveyance he’d ever used, but it might be the smelliest.

Thankfully, Sam didn’t press the point, and just slid into the vehicle’s front seat. Moon climbed in the back, and a moment later Dean emerged from the building to take the driver’s seat. The trip to the warehouse was longer than the trip from the tower last night, in part because there were so many more of these vehicles on the streets during the day. At least they had a clever way of handling traffic at intersections that kept the streets from getting too clogged. Moon had observed some of this over the last four days while trying to figure out where they were, find Consolation, and get back home, but seeing it from within one of the weird vehicles was a novelty.

Finally the vehicle pulled to a stop in front of the big warehouse Moon remembered from four days ago. A handful of groundlings bustled around massive boxy wagons parked beside the buildings on either side, but nobody was near their warehouse, and the groundlings didn’t give Moon or the Winchesters a second glance.

Bright yellow and black ribbon had been stretched across the warehouse’s open bay doors, stamped with words in the groundling language. The Winchesters ducked under it into the warehouse, while Moon hung back, his mouth open to taste the air. Mostly he could smell the thick industrial stink of oil and burning that accompanied all the groundling vehicles in this place, and the sharper smell of groundling sweat, but beneath it were still traces of the Leviathan who’d been here four days ago. Nothing recent, though - they hadn’t come back. He could also smell Malachite, who’d followed the Winchesters’ vehicle from the air; she would probably land on the roof and find a way in up there to avoid being seen by groundlings.

“Moon?”

He turned to see Sam Winchester watching him curiously from the other side of the black and yellow ribbon. “I’m coming,” he said, and ducked under the ribbon.

Dean was already across the room, crouching beside the big blood diagram on the floor. Bright orange cones had sprung up like mushrooms around it and the various smears of oily Leviathan blood; Moon prodded one curiously with his foot, sending it skidding across the stone floor.

“Police evidence markers,” Sam said, then added wryly, “Try not to touch them.”

Moon snorted, but picked his way through the rest of the cones carefully to join Dean at the circle of symbols. Sam followed and crouched beside his brother. “I don’t recognize any of this,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Whatever magic this is, it’s not anything even Bobby knew about.”

“That doesn’t tell us much,” Dean groused. “Leviathan are ancient, like, God’s first fuck-up ancient. Who knows what spells they have hidden up their sleeves?”

Sam looked up at Moon. “Do you remember anything else from when they brought you here? Anything they said, or did, or any objects they might have had?”

Moon considered, trying to remember what he’d seen while dangling upside-down over the circle of Leviathan four days ago. “There was a mat with a stone on it, over there,” he said finally, and pointed. “A big pale stone, surrounded by candles. They took it with them when they left.”

“Anything else?”

“They had a cage waiting for Consolation. They barely talked while they sealed her in it and moved it into a big wagon.” He jerked his chin toward the open bay doors, then shrugged. “But that was it.”

“One of them was holding something,” Malachite said from overhead.

“ _Jesus Christ!_ ” Dean hissed. With reflexes better than any other groundling Moon had seen, he leaped backward from his crouch, produding a shooting weapon from somewhere and pointing it up in the direction of Malachite’s voice. His finger tightened on the trigger and Moon braced himself to leap at Dean before he could shoot.

Sam, who’d only startled hard enough to fall over from his crouch next to the symbol circle, snapped, “Dean!”

For a heartbeat nobody moved. Then Dean took a deep breath and slowly eased off the trigger. It was another several heartbeats before he lowered his weapon, and considerably longer before he finally shook himself and put the weapon away. Only then did Moon ease out of his own tense stance. On the floor, Sam blew out a relieved sigh and ran his fingers through his hair. Dean glared up into the rafters, where Malachite crouched on a wide beam. “Don’t scare me like that,” he snapped. “It’s rude.”

Malachite jumped off the beam, wings flaring to slow her fall, and landed on the other side of the symbol circle from the Winchesters. As if the interlude hadn’t happened, she said, “It was small - like this.” Her claws moved to indicate something maybe half the size of Moon’s fist. “Black, and shining.”

“A stone?” Sam asked.

Malachite flicked a spine in a negative. “It looked soft.”

“A large pale stone, and a small soft black thing,” Moon said thoughtfully.

“Could be anything,” Sam said. He shifted, putting a hand on the floor inside the symbol circle beside him to push himself upright. “We’d need to see—Do you feel that?”

Moon blinked. Sam had gone still, frowning, looking around like Chime did when his odd new magic let him hear something no one else could. Dean’s attention had snapped to Sam, wary, but he didn’t say anything as Sam ran a hand carefully over the blood pattern on the floor. “Something’s happening,” Sam said. “It’s… I think someone’s trying to activate this thing.”

“Activate it?” Dean demanded. “Who’d be trying to activate it? There’s no one else here.”

Realization hit, and Moon looked over their heads at Malachite. “Jade,” he breathed. “Merit was with us, and your mentors were half a day’s flight away - they’re probably trying to reach us!”

Malachite’s gaze sharpened. “Trying,” she repeated. “What do we need to do to help them?”

“Uh…” Sam pushed himself to his feet, looking around. “There.”

He pointed at a spot in the blood pattern where the symbols had been scuffed and smeared away, probably either during the fight four days ago, or when the local authorities had come through to investigate. Moon hopped over the circle to crouch beside the smeared spot. “Can we fix it?”

“We can try,” Sam said. “I don’t recognize any of these symbols, but I think I can figure out what these should look like.” He pulled a knife from a pocket and sliced a shallow cut along the inside of his forearm, then dipped his fingers in the blood that welled up and began sketching lines into the pattern.

“Hang on,” Dean interjected. “Are we sure this is a good idea? What if it’s more Leviathan on the other side?”

“Then we tear them apart,” Malachite said, sounding bored.

Dean eyed her. “You’re freaky,” he muttered. Malachite ignored him.

Sam finished fixing the symbols and sat back, absently wrapping a brightly-patterned square of cloth around his forearm over the cut. “That’s it,” he said.

“Nothing’s happening,” Dean pointed out helpfully.

Moon rolled his eyes. “Do we need to do something else?”

“Hard to say,” Sam said. “We might need that stone, or…”

He trailed off as Malachite stepped up to the circle, crouched beside it, and put both hands on top of the symbols. _Power_ flared through Moon so suddenly he staggered: a queen’s power, her connection to her court, and Moon realized Malachite was pushing her power at the circle, _through_ it. He stepped back as a spinning vortex of air appeared in the middle of the circle, stretching upward until a hole some ten paces across yawned above them.

The vortex flashed, and a flurry of brightly-colored figures dropped through to land in the middle of the circle. Moon had just enough time to recognize Jade and Chime in the group before Chime barreled into him. “Moon!” Chime cried. “You’re alive!”

Moon hugged him, then Merit who had also lunged for him. Then he pushed them both away and looked up at Jade, who walked up to him with more dignity but no less urgency. “I’m fine,” he told her.

She just swept him into a fierce embrace.

* * *

Sam leaped backward on reflex as creatures - Raksura - appeared in the center of the spell circle. There were more of them than he’d expected, seven or eight, though they were moving so fast he couldn’t get a good count. Several of them swarmed Moon excitedly, while two others went to Malachite, one burying herself against Malachite’s chest for an embrace while the other just sighed with relief. Half of them were in brightly-colored dragon forms, but four looked human.

No, scratch that. Three of them looked human, but the fourth looked like an escapee from the Lord of the Rings movie sets. He was big, taller and broader than Sam, with a heavy jaw and brow. His skin was pale, almost sickly so, with a series of ugly burn scars along his chest, and his dark hair had been tied back in braids. He wore nothing but a wrap of fabric around his waist, held up by a beaded belt. He spotted Sam staring at him and bared his teeth, revealing blunted fangs that would have jutted through his lower lip if they hadn’t been filed down.

One of the human-looking Raksura stepped in front of the orc-man. “Don’t,” he said flatly, in Raksuran. Surprisingly, the orc-man actually flinched back at that, lowering his head and looking away.

The Raksura turned to eye Sam. He was tall and slim, like Moon, but his face was lined and weathered, and everything about him had faded to grey: his skin, his hair, even his clothes were grey. The only spot of color on him was his blue eyes, and while the right one was clouded, his gaze was sharp. “Who’s this?” he asked, still in Raksuran. The question was apparently directed at Moon, though he didn’t look away from Sam.

Moon disentangled himself from the tall blue dragon-lady he’d been hugging, though he stayed next to her with her arm wrapped around his waist. “That’s Sam Winchester,” he said, then pointed at Dean, who’d come around the circle to stand warily next to Sam. “That’s his brother Dean.” To Sam, he said, “That’s Stone, line-grandfather of Indigo Cloud.”

Stone inclined his head to Sam politely, something between a nod and a half-bow, and Sam returned the gesture. Formalities discharged, Stone turned away to study the rest of the warehouse. Moon rolled his eyes at Stone’s back and continued the introductions. “This is Jade,” he said, indicating the female next to him. “Sister queen of Indigo Cloud.”

Jade was taller than Moon’s dragon form, but nowhere near Malachite’s size, and Sam got the distinct impression she was younger than Malachite. Her blue scales were overlaid with a silver-grey web pattern, and her mane of spines and frills stretched all the way down her back to her tail. She wore a jeweled belt around her hips, golden bands around her upper arms, and several bracelets on each wrist, but no other clothing. She inclined her head to Sam as Stone had done, and he nodded back.

Moon turned to the dragon-form Raksura on his other side, this one male and a much darker blue than Jade, with a golden sheen to his scales. The male’s form blurred and shifted, and abruptly he looked human, tall and lean and bronze-skinned like Moon, but with fluffy straw-colored hair and a stubborn expression. “This is Chime,” Moon said. He pointed next at the smaller, stockier Raksura crouched on the ground studying the symbol circle, who Sam was pretty sure had been in dragon-form a minute ago but who now looked human. “That’s Merit. They’re both from Indigo Cloud.”

“Hello,” Sam said. Dean just nodded cautiously. Moon was making the introductions in Raksuran, and Dean probably had no idea what was going on. Though Sam caught him sneaking an admiring glance at Jade. _Of course_ , Sam thought, and resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Trust Dean’s libido to be in full force even when the subject was a seven-foot-tall terrifying dragon woman.

Chime smiled back at the Winchesters, though like Moon, he didn’t show teeth. “Hello,” he said. Merit didn’t even look up from his examination of the symbols, and Sam could hear him muttering to himself. Chime added, “You speak Raksuran?”

“They did a spell,” Moon explained before Sam could answer, and Chime nodded thoughtfully. Moon pointed over at the two Raksura beside Malachite next. “The warrior - the tall one - is Rise,” he said. “The Arbora - the short one - is Lithe. They’re from Opal Night, Malachite’s court.” Rise was dressed like Moon, Chime, and Merit in sturdy pants and a belted tunic, while Lithe wore a brightly-patterned frock and had a satchel slung over one shoulder. Like all the other Raksura, they were barefoot.

Finally Moon turned to the big orc-man, and the small, narrow-faced man who was half-hiding behind him. The small man had bronze skin, fluffy pale hair, and a build of wiry muscle. Like the orc, he wore only a belted kilt around his waist, and he kept throwing nervous glances at Malachite. “That’s Kethel,” Moon said, indicating the orc-man. “He’s a kethel.” Moon hesitated, watching Sam’s face; he seemed to be expecting a reaction of some kind. But Sam had no idea what a kethel was or what reaction Moon thought he should have, and after a moment Moon continued, “And that’s…” He paused again, blinking, apparently confused.

“That’s First,” Jade spoke up. “Consolation’s dakti.”

“Oh,” Moon said. “I’ve never seen his groundling form before.”

“What,” Malachite said flatly, “are they doing here.” Her voice was low and dangerous, and First ducked all the way behind Kethel.

“Consolation is ours,” Kethel said in a deep, rumbling voice. “We help you.”

Malachite looked over at Jade, and something in her expression made Sam flinch back a step and Dean reach for his gun. Jade’s spines lifted slightly, and she said, “They _have_ been helping. And their queen was taken. I chose to let them come.”

Malachite’s tail twitched, once, the spade at its tip scraping along the cement floor in the suddenly quiet warehouse. All the other Raksura watched the two queens warily, except for Stone, who had wandered away to the open bay doors and just looked bored.

Moon sighed, with the air of one annoyed by a long-standing argument. “Let it go, Malachite. _Please_.”

Lithe, still tucked against Malachite’s side, looked up at her worriedly. “They really have been helping. They want Consolation back as much as we want you back.”

For a long moment, nobody moved. Sam held his breath; he had no idea what problem Malachite had with Kethel and First, but her tense, coiled fury radiated through the room like a living thing. Beside Sam, Dean had a hand on his gun, his eyes darting between Malachite and Kethel, clearly gauging angles and distances for if this became a fight.

Malachite’s tail lashed once more, then abruptly the sense of danger faded. Malachite gave no other sign, but Lithe, Moon, and Rise all relaxed. Jade’s spines remained lifted for a moment longer before she shook herself, her spines settling down along her back. First eased out from behind Kethel, though he kept Kethel between himself and Malachite.

Jade said to Moon, “Where is Consolation, anyway?”

“She was stolen by groundlings called Leviathan,” Moon said, and indicated Sam and Dean with a jerk of his shoulder that probably would have been a spine movement in his other form. “They think Leviathan want to make Consolation their new leader.”

Jade’s scaled brow lifted. So did Chime’s, and Merit even looked up from where he’d been examining the rune circle. It was Chime who said, “Their leader?”

Kethel growled, a low rumble that vibrated the concrete floor. “Consolation is _ours_ ,” he said.

“It sounds like you have a lot of explaining to do,” Jade said to Moon.

“We should go back to the motel,” Sam interjected. “It’s safer than this place, and we can talk there.”

Jade eyed him, frowning. “You’re not Raksura, and you’re not Fell. What are you?”

“Human,” Sam said.

Moon added, “He’s some kind of shaman or mentor. He’s the one who did the spell so he can speak Raksuran and I can speak their language.”

Merit, Chime, and Lithe all perked up, their heads swiveling in unison to look at Sam. He felt abruptly like he’d just opened a can of tuna in the middle of a bunch of cats. Chime said, “You know a spell to share languages?”

“Uh,” Sam said. “I… Yes? I can show you when we get back to the motel.”

Chime and Merit looked to Jade, and Lithe looked to Malachite, all with the same excited expression. Jade snorted. “Let’s go, then.”

“You’re not all going to fit in the car,” Sam pointed out.

“Most of us can fly,” Moon said, then paused, considering. “Kethel will need to ride in your wagon.”

“Why?”

“He’s a kethel,” Moon said, as though that explained everything. His expression was closed, the way it had been last night when he’d ignored Sam’s attempts to ask questions, so Sam decided to leave it for now.

“I’ll stay with Kethel,” First piped up, throwing an uneasy glance at Malachite as though expecting her to object.

“I’ll ride with them,” Stone said. He still stood in the big bay doors, peering out at the surrounding area, and Sam hadn’t realized he was even paying attention to the conversation.

Sam glanced at Malachite, but she had already jumped up into the rafters, her dark form blending with the shadows until she was nearly invisible. Rise shifted to her dragon form, green scales shimmering as she scooped Lithe into her arms and followed. Moon said to Sam, “We’ll meet you there,” then shifted, picked up Merit, and went after Malachite, with Jade and Chime on his heels.

Dean thumped Sam on the arm. “What the hell’s going on?”

Oops. Sam had forgotten they were speaking Raksuran this whole time. “We’re going back to the motel,” Sam said in English. “Maybe when we’re there we should do the language spell with you, too.”

“Ya think?” Dean asked, and snorted. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Ten minutes later they were packed into the Impala and on the road. Kethel had ended up riding shotgun for the simple reason that he was too big to fit in the back seat, and even then the top of his head brushed the Impala’s roof. Stone, sitting directly behind him, leaned back against the bench seat in a way that looked relaxed, the same way a panther looked relaxed while it waited in a tree for prey to pass by. First, meanwhile, seemed to be trying his hardest not to touch Stone, which meant leaning sideways against Sam. At least the morning rush hour was nearly over, so the ride wouldn’t be too long.

To distract himself, Sam asked, “So, uh, is ‘Kethel’ your name, or what you are?”

Kethel grunted. “Yes.”

“Um,” Sam said.

“He’s a kethel and his name’s Kethel,” Stone said.

“What’s a kethel, then?” Sam asked.

Stone turned from where he’d been staring out the window to eye Sam instead. “Do you know about the Fell here?”

“Moon told us a little,” Sam said cautiously.

“Major kethel are a type of Fell,” Stone said. “So are minor dakti.” His voice was carefully blank.

_Oh_. Jade had said First was one of Consolation’s dakti. No wonder Malachite had been unhappy they were here.

First spoke up, sounding half nervous and half indignant. “I’m half-Raksuran. My sire was a consort.”

Kethel rumbled from the front seat, a clear warning, and First fell silent, folding his arms across his bare chest and sinking sullenly against the seat back. Dean caught Sam’s eyes in the rearview mirror, a wary question in the quirk of his eyebrow: _everything okay?_

Sam responded with a slight jerk of his head: _talk later_. Dean rolled his eyes but went back to driving.

Still in Raksuran, Sam said to Stone, “Moon didn’t tell us much about the half-Fell, half-Raksura thing. Just that Consolation was a half-Fell queen that Malachite is responsible for.”

Stone snorted. “You could say that.”

“What else could you say?” Sam asked.

“That the Fell have been stealing Raksura for turns, trying to crossbreed with us,” Stone answered. His voice was dry; if he felt any of the rage Moon hadn’t bothered to hide about the idea, he wasn’t showing it. He indicated First with a jerk of his head. “This one and Consolation are the result of one flight capturing a Raksuran consort.”

“Kethel isn’t?” Sam said carefully.

“Consolation leads us,” First explained. “She led us in killing the progenitor. She took us, and killed any who didn’t follow her.”

Sam nodded slowly, beginning to get the picture. Consolation had taken over her group - flight, Stone had called it - of Fell, with the support of the other half-Raksura. Some full Fell had joined her coup, and now the half-Fell First and full-Fell Kethel worked alongside full-blooded Raksura to rescue their missing queen. The Raksura weren’t all happy about this, probably because of what Moon had said about the Fell eating people. Probably - hopefully - Kethel, First, and Consolation didn’t eat people, based on what Moon had said about Malachite being responsible for them, but that wouldn’t make the alliance any less uneasy.

An uneasiness Sam was all too familiar with, after years of working alongside angels and demons and monsters alike. After Ruby, after the demon blood, and a sudden pang of sympathy for First and Kethel’s position among the Raksura hit Sam in the gut. “So that’s why Malachite was mad about them being here,” he said. “Because they’re Fell.”

Stone nodded. “The Fell have been the biggest threat to the Three Worlds for far longer than I’ve been alive, and I’ve been alive for a very long time. Malachite is the one who chose to let the half-breed flight live. But she let them live assuming they’d be living in the Reaches under her watch, away from any groundlings. And she’s… especially sensitive about them being around consorts in general, and Moon in particular.”

“Why?” Sam asked. “What’s so special about consorts?” He knew what the word meant in English, but there were odd layers of meaning to the Raksuran word which the translation spell struggled with.

“Consorts carry the court’s bloodlines,” Stone explained. “Young consorts like Moon are valuable, both to their birth court and to whichever queen takes them.” He added lightly, “Old consorts like me are just cranky.”

Sam let himself smile at the joke, remembering just in time not to show teeth. Stone was clearly trying to lighten the mood, maybe steer the conversation away from a sensitive topic, and Sam didn’t want to press.

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then First looked up at Sam. “Is Consolation all right?” he asked softly.

“...I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “If Leviathan want to make her their own leader, they’d need her alive, but…” He shook his head. “We don’t know for sure. I’m sorry.”

First made a low keening noise in the back of his throat. Kethel turned around, reaching one muscular arm over the seat back to give First a shove to the head. “We find her,” Kethel said firmly.

Sam nodded. “We will,” he promised. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her, and get you guys home.”


	6. Chapter 6

“What’s this?” Merit asked, poking at the wood chips in the bowl.

“Wormwood,” Sam said, then had to swat Merit’s hand out of the bowl when he tried to pick out a handful of the chips.

“What’s it for?” Chime asked.

Sam pointed at the book sitting open on the bed. “It’s what the spellbook says to use.”

“Right,” Lithe said, “but what does it _do?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Sam admitted.

Three horrified gasps made him look up at Merit, Lithe, and Chime where they leaned over him. “You’re casting a spell without knowing what your components do?” Chime said, visibly appalled.

“Look, I’m not a… a mentor, or a shaman,” Sam said. “I’m just following what the book says.”

“That’s so… so…” Lithe said, and floundered.

“Dangerous,” Merit supplied. “Flower would’ve killed us if we ever did anything like that!”

“It’s fine,” Sam said, exasperated. “This is how magic works here, all right? As long as you follow the instructions correctly—”

“But what if you get something wrong?” Chime demanded. He grabbed the spellbook off the bed and ran his finger down the page before apparently realizing he couldn’t read any of the English words. “And how can you modify it to do what you need it to do if you don’t know how it works?”

Sam tugged the book out of Chime’s hands and set it back on the bed, then shouldered Lithe out of the way as gently as he could so he could finish shredding the mugwort. “I don’t modify it,” he said to Chime. “And I’m careful not to get it wrong.”

“But if you can’t modify it—” Chime started, at the same time Merit said, “Being careful isn’t enough—”

A sharp hiss from behind Sam scattered all three Raksura like startled cats. Moon said, “Stop distracting him.”

“Sorry!” Merit squeaked from where he’d ended up on the far side of the bed.

Sam shook his head, smiling despite himself. What he’d thought was curiosity on Moon’s part last night had apparently been downright disinterest for a Raksura - Merit, Chime, and Lithe hadn’t stopped asking questions or being underfoot since they’d gotten to the motel room. Moon had retreated to the far corner with Jade, Malachite, Rise, and Stone to explain the situation, while Kethel and First hovered nearby, trying to listen without attracting the Raksuras’ attention. Sam was setting up the language-transfer spell again, to allow Dean to speak Raksuran, but with Merit, Chime, and Lithe asking so many questions, it was taking longer than before.

At least Sam was nearly finished. His Raksuran audience was already creeping back in, so he quickly performed the last couple of steps, then motioned Dean over to stand in the circle. Merit and Chime both jumped up to join him, which resulted in them spending several seconds elbowing each other and Moon breaking up the scuffle with another exasperated hiss.

“Moon—” Chime started.

“I’m doing it,” Moon said, then shot a look at Jade, who’d stepped forward, mouth open to protest. “I’ve done it once already.”

Jade subsided, her frills and spines ruffling and settling down her back. She’d shifted from her winged form to a smaller, softer scaled form; if she had a human form like the others she hadn’t shown it yet. “Can’t you ever let me be worried about you?” she said wryly.

“Maybe when we’re back in the colony,” Moon said, equally dry. He stepped into the circle with Dean, who had watched the exchange with something between amusement and irritation. In English, Moon added, “Let’s get this over with.”

Sam had to move Lithe aside to get at the spellbook, then shoulder Merit out of the way to light the ingredients on fire, but finally he got the spell cast. Light flashed through the room and Dean said in Raksuran, “Finally.”

“I agree,” Malachite said. Everyone in the room jumped except Stone, though even he tensed slightly. Sam was starting to get used to the way Malachite constantly vanished into the background, but it was still unnerving, and brought back way too many memories of

( _Lucifer)_

two years ago, when he’d been going slowly insane. He dug a thumb into the old scar on his palm, and pretended not to notice Dean’s worried glance.

Malachite said, “Now that we’re all able to understand one another, we need to find Consolation.”

“Easier said than done,” Dean complained. “Cleveland’s a big place - who knows where Leviathan stuck her.”

“It might help to think about what they want her for,” Lithe spoke up. “You said they wanted to make her their new leader, right? How would they do that?”

“Good point,” Sam said, and looked over at Kethel and First. “She wouldn’t just… agree to something like that, would she?”

First shook his head vehemently. “She is our queen. She would not abandon us.”

“She wouldn’t work very well as a Leviathan leader anyway,” Dean said. “She ain’t a gross puddle of goo.”

“So how are they planning to make her their leader?” Chine wondered.

“Some kind of ritual, maybe,” Sam suggested.

Merit looked thoughtful. “I suppose it’s possible, though I have no idea what kind of ritual—”

Dean’s phone rang, making most of the Raksura jump. Jade’s spines flared and Rise hissed. Dean fumbled his phone from his pocket and held it up to his ear. “Yeah?” A pause, then, “Hey, Detective Carmichael,” Dean said. “Hang on, my partner’s here, I’m gonna put you on speaker.”

He set the phone on the motel room’s little desk and tapped the speaker button. Sam leaned in and said, “Good morning, Detective.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Merit and Lithe creep forward, visibly fascinated by the phone.

“Howdy,” Carmichael answered, his voice tinny over the phone’s tiny speakers. “You boys wouldn’t happen to have been at the Erieview Tower last night, would you?”

Sam traded a glance with Dean. _Oops._ They’d known the Cleveland PD had shown up after Benjamin Valencia’s apparent suicide dive off the tower; and they’d asked Carmichael about Valencia earlier that day. They should have expected him to put two and two together. Dean said, “We went over there last night to talk to Benjamin Valencia and Johan Wood, but their secretary said they’d left for the day.”

“The secretary let us poke around their office for a bit,” Sam added, “but we didn’t find anything interesting.”

“You didn’t talk to Valencia at all?” Carmichael asked.

“Nope,” Dean said, the lie making his eyes light up with amusement. “Didn’t even see the guy.”

Jade stepped up next to Sam and, in a voice too quiet for Carmichael to hear over the phone, asked, “What’s this about?”

“He’s a… city guard,” Sam answered, equally quiet. She might not be able to understand the English conversation, but Carmichael wasn’t making much of an effort to hide the suspicion in his tone. “We fought Leviathan on top of the Erieview Tower last night. Moon and Malachite were there. He’s asking what happened.”

Jade lifted a scaled brow at Moon, who protested, “Nobody saw us!”

Carmichael was saying over the phone, “Interesting. Because security cameras saw you guys go up to the roof along with a third guy, then caught all three of you coming back down about fifteen minutes later.”

Dean grimaced at Sam - they’d both missed the cameras, a lapse Dad would’ve chewed them out for for weeks. Moon, who _could_ understand the English words, hissed in consternation; when Jade narrowed her eyes at him, he crossed his arms and turned away, clearly sulking.

Carmichael was still talking: “This buddy of yours looked like quite the character. Who was he?”

“He was a customer of Valencia and Wood’s antiques company,” Dean said. “He was looking for them too - apparently they stiffed him on a deal. The secretary told us Valencia had gone up to the roof, and when the guy heard that, he followed us up there. We didn’t see Valencia on the roof, but we found the guy. Brought him back down, questioned him a bit, drove him home.”

“He have a name?”

“John Oates,” Dean blurted, then winced.

Fortunately, Carmichael apparently wasn’t a fan of 70s soul music, because all he said was, “All right. We’ll have to talk to him too. You said you drove him home - you got an address for him?”

Sam caught Dean’s eye and shook his head. They needed to sidetrack Carmichael, get him off their backs, especially now that they had another half-dozen Raksura on their hands. Dean made a face back but gestured to the phone: _all yours_. Sam nudged Lithe out of the way from where she’d crouched in front of the table to stare at the phone. “What’s going on, Detective? Why the third degree?”

“You didn’t notice all the lights and sirens?” Carmichael asked dryly. “Benjamin Valencia took a dive off the top of the tower around the same time you two were there.”

_Crap._ Sam said, “We heard sirens, but…”

“Cleveland’s a big city,” Dean said. “There’s usually sirens.”

“But if you thought we had anything to do with Valencia’s dive,” Sam said, “why call us? Why not just show up and take us in for questioning?”

A pause, then Carmichael sighed audibly, the speakers crackling. “...Because a murder investigation needs a body, and we don’t have one.”

Moon turned around from sulking to hiss under his breath. Sam traded a glance with his brother, then asked Carmichael, “What do you mean? Even a forty-floor fall leaves _something_.”

“Yeah,” Carmichael agreed. “Our guys practically had to mop up what was left of Valencia. But when the coroner opened the drawer this morning, it was empty.”

_Leviathan_ , Dean mouthed, an irritated expression crossing his face, and Sam nodded. Out loud, Dean said, “That’s pretty bizarre all right. What kind of dead body gets up and walks away?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Carmichael said. “I’ve been a detective for a long time, long enough to know to listen to my gut. And my gut says you two know a lot more than you’re letting on.”

Sam sighed and scrubbed a hand over his mouth. They didn’t have time to get into the whole “monsters are real” song and dance with Carmichael, but they couldn’t afford to have him constantly hounding them, either. Sam glanced at his brother, who grimaced, clearly thinking the same thing. Shouldering Merit gently out of the way so he could lean closer to the phone again, Sam said reluctantly, “We have an idea about what’s going on, but it’s not confirmed yet. We just need a little more time to make sure we’re right.”

Carmichael snorted. “A little more time, huh? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Dean said. “Just give us a little more time, we’ll solve this thing and drop it in your lap all tied up in a pretty pink bow.”

“I don’t want a bow,” Carmichael snapped. “I want to know what the hell’s going on in my city.”

“So do we,” Sam said. “Please, Detective. We want to help you, but we need to be able to do our job—”

“—and you’re asking me to back off, huh,” Carmichael said. A long pause, then he continued reluctantly, “I guess if the Feds are telling me to butt the hell out, I don’t have much of a choice. Just… let me know as soon as you find something, okay?”

“We will,” Sam promised. “Thanks.” He hung up without waiting for Carmichael’s reply.

“Ask later,” Moon said immediately, the Raksuran words directed at Merit, Chime, and Lithe. Chime, who’d already opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, looking disappointed.

“Dammit,” Dean muttered. “A time limit’s the last thing we need.”

Jade flicked a spine at him. “Speak Raksuran, please.”

“Sorry.” Dean repeated himself in Raksuran.

As he did, a thought hit Sam abruptly. “It might be the answer, though,” he said slowly, letting the logic play through his mind. “Or at least a piece of the puzzle.”

“What do you mean?” Jade asked.

Sam ran his hands through his hair. The motel room was too small and too crowded for him to pace, but he was restless with the feeling of being on the edge of realization. “Leviathan’s been pretty careful up till now to avoid the attention of law enforcement,” he said. “So why did Valencia take the risk of escaping the coroner’s table?”

“He was probably bored,” Dean said dismissively. “Locked up in a drawer isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time.”

Sam shook his head. “And why’d they take the risk of attacking us on the roof in the first place? I mean, we spooked them by asking questions, but they could’ve let us run around chasing our tails for a few more days.”

“But they didn’t,” Moon said, following the logic. “They took a risk because they were running out of time, and were afraid you’d stop them if they waited.”

“Exactly,” Sam said, and turned to Dean. “Remember how all the disappearances originally happened around the full moon?”

“Yeah, so?” Dean said. “It ain’t werewolves, you made your point—”

Sam held up a hand to stop him. “That was—” Raksura apparently didn’t have a concept of _weeks_. “—half a month ago. What happens half a month after the full moon?”

Merit got it first. “The new moon.”

“You think they need to do this - whatever ‘this’ is - during the new moon?” Jade said.

“It’s a pretty powerful time, magically speaking,” Sam said. “It’d make sense.”

“And it’s tonight,” Malachite said grimly.

“Damn,” Dean muttered. “Doesn’t leave us a lot of time to find them.”

“There’s gotta be something,” Sam said. He looked around the room, frustrated - and his eyes fell on his shoulder bag, the one he’d stuffed full of papers from the office of World Curios and Rarities last night. Dodging past Merit and Chime, he picked up the bag and dumped it out on the bed.

“Sammy?” Dean said.

“Why did Leviathan choose several people who worked at an antiques company?” Sam asked him. Without waiting for an answer, he held up the thumb drive full of the company’s shipping records from the last six months. “Malachite and Moon said they had a big pale stone and a small black… _thing_ , right?”

“Right,” Moon agreed. He’d come up behind them, peering curiously at the thumb drive.

Sam snagged the laptop from the desk, flipped it open, and stuck the thumb drive in - and was immediately surrounded by curious Raksura.

“Is this… a _book?_ ” Merit demanded. He touched the computer screen cautiously. “How do you write on it?”

Jade hissed impatiently and Merit snapped his hand away, looking abashed. Ignoring them, Sam said to Dean, “How much you want to bet they picked the antiques shop so they could get their hands on whatever those stones are?”

“It wasn’t just an antiques company,” Dean pointed out. “Bunch of ‘em were dock workers.”

“For the warehouse, maybe?” Merit offered. “The one we landed in?”

Dean shook his head. “Not close enough to the water.”

“Looks like that warehouse was owned by World Curios, anyway,” Sam said. He was flipping through the files he’d downloaded, skimming each one for dates, descriptions, anything that might give them a clue about what those relics were, and many of the bills of lading referenced that warehouse.

“What about a boat?” Lithe asked.

Moon looked thoughtful. Dean said, “What would they need a boat for?”

“Maybe something about the ritual means they have to be on the water?” Chime suggested. “I don’t know anything about groundling magic, but if it requires a certain phase of the moon then maybe it requires a certain place, too.”

“It’s possible,” Moon admitted, and glanced to Sam for confirmation. He nodded absently, still flipping through the files he’d downloaded.

“It might simply be a way to isolate themselves,” Malachite said. “There are groundlings everywhere within a day of warrior’s flight from here, except on the water.”

“That would make more sense,” Dean said. “They get out far enough on the lake, not only is nobody around to see whatever they’re doing, nobody’s going to sneak up on them.”

Stone, still leaning against the far wall, snorted. Sam took that to mean _Nobody human will sneak up on them, but Raksura can._

Dean nudged Sam’s elbow. “Think you can figure out if they stole a ship?”

Sam hesitated. “Not easily. Dozens of ships pass through the Cleveland port every day, and we don’t have any way of knowing which ones those dockworkers might have been involved with.”

He was going to say more, that they could go down to the port and ask, but something caught his eye on the screen and he leaned in closer. Dean said, “Sammy?”

Sam gestured to Moon and pointed at a photo he’d pulled up. “Does this look like the big pale block you saw at the Leviathan portal?”

Moon squinted at the screen. “I think so.”

“So get this,” Sam said. “Two weeks ago, a woman named Marianne Petersen made a special order through World Curios.”

“Marianne Peterson was one of the missing twenty-some, wasn’t she?” Dean said.

Sam nodded. “The order was for a block of limestone supposedly cut from the Foundation Stone in the Temple Mount.”

“What’s that?” Jade asked. She’d come closer as well, leaning over Chime’s shoulder to study the laptop screen. Sam spotted Dean sneaking a look at her, _ahem,_ figure up close, and shot him a glare. Dean wiggled his eyebrows in response.

Sighing, Sam explained to Jade, “It’s a holy site for two different religions. They have different beliefs about what the site represents, but they agree on one thing: it was the place where the Earth was first created.”

“So, what, the Garden of Eden?” Dean asked skeptically, distracted from ogling Jade’s ass.

“Kind of,” Sam hedged. It had been a while since he’d studied either Jewish or Islamic traditions, and he didn’t remember the precise details, but the details didn’t matter anyway. “It’s also supposed to be the place where all water comes from, and the point in the universe which touches all creation.”

“Which means?” Jade asked, a hint of impatience in her voice.

“Leviathan is one of God’s earliest creations,” Sam said. “And they were opening a portal across… realities, or universes, or something.”

“So this block was a focus for that spell,” Lithe said thoughtfully. “It touches all creation, so it can touch this world and our own.”

“That explains the block,” Moon said. “But what about the other thing, the soft black thing Malachite saw?”

Sam shook his head. “I haven’t found anything like that in the order records.”

“We’ll find out what it’s for when we find Leviathan,” Dean said. “Which we still don’t know how to do.”

“You said they might be on a boat?” Jade said.

Sam nodded. “That seems like the most reasonable option, considering what we know about the people they took over.” He turned back to the laptop, pulling up the police reports from two weeks ago. “And… yeah. One of the people they grabbed was Captain Aaron Metcalfe, of the _Kaministiqua._ ” He leaned back, letting the others get a look at the photo of a large grey-and-white freighter that accompanied the captain’s profile.

“Finding one ship in all of Lake Erie’s not gonna be easy,” Dean groused. “Even if the ship’s one of those big freighters, that’s a lot of lake to get lost in.”

“It’s not that big,” Moon said. “You can see all the way across it. The freshwater sea with the floating city was much bigger.”

“Still,” Sam said. “We’re getting close to the end of navigation season, so there’s a lot of freighters out there doing one final run before the lakes ice over.”

Malachite stepped forward. Unlike Jade, she’d kept her winged form this whole time, and now she shook out her wings pointedly. “We’ll find the ship.”

“I—” Sam said, then, “Oh.” Because finding a ship hiding out in the expanse of Lake Erie might be difficult for two human hunters, but half a dozen flying Raksura could do it in no time.

Malachite flicked a spine, which apparently meant something to the Raksura because Jade, Moon, Rise, and Chime all moved to stand beside her. Jade raised a scaled brow at Stone, who’d stayed put against the wall; he grunted dismissively. “There’s too many groundlings around who don’t know what we are.”

Jade’s spines moved in a way Sam was beginning to guess meant acceptance, and she said only, “Keep the Arbora out of trouble.” Stone snorted.

Then First stepped up to join the group.

Malachite didn’t move, but Sam was abruptly, horribly _aware_ of her presence in a way he hadn’t been a second ago. Her spines had risen very, very slightly, and her tail did that slow, dangerous lash across the floor.

First flinched, but lifted his chin. “I’m as much Raksura as Lithe is. Consolation is my queen. I want to help find her.”

“I thought I made clear,” Malachite said flatly, “that none of your flight was to come near consorts of my bloodline. I’ve tolerated your presence here because she allowed it—” Malachite didn’t make any gesture, but Sam guessed she meant Jade— “but you’ll stay here and do as I say.” 

Sam stared at them, feeling increasingly like he was missing pieces of a puzzle. They’d said First was half-Fell, but Lithe appeared to be a normal Raksura. Then again, aside from his clothing, First looked like the other Raksura, too. Sam looked over at Lithe, who grimaced.

“Yes, I’m half-Fell,” she said. “Opal Night’s eastern colony was destroyed by Fell. They stole…” She hesitated, eyes darting to Malachite, before continuing, “...a consort, among others, for breeding. Malachite killed the entire flight and rescued us, and raised us in Opal Night.”

Sam winced. He didn’t need to ask to guess that the consort had been important to Malachite - _belonged_ to Malachite, in a way the Raksuran language had terminology for even if English didn’t. It was no wonder she hated the Fell, if she’d gone through that.

First said pointedly, “ _We_ didn’t steal the consort.”

“You tried to steal Moon,” Malachite said. “My fledgling.” Her voice was weirdly empty, her eyes impossibly dark. It was eerily like when a demon stopped pretending to be human - that same sense that something had just gone horribly, horribly wrong, that you weren’t speaking to a person anymore but something unnatural and deadly. Jade’s spines rose, her stance wary, and Moon and Stone tensed. The other Raksura eased back, not quite cowering but clearly afraid of Malachite. Across the room, Sam saw Dean’s hand edging to the gun tucked in his jacket.

“We didn’t know better!” First protested. “We needed help!”

Malachite growled, her tail lashing again. First cowered, hissing, and Kethel shifted his weight, his eyes darting between Malachite and First as if gauging whether he could get between them. Sam hesitated for just an instant - he was way outside of his depth here; he had no idea of the politics between the Fell and the Raksura. Clearly it was a lot more complicated than just _monsters_ and _monster-killers_. But he wasn’t going to let them have whatever this fight was in the motel room.

He stepped into the middle of the room. “ _Hey!_ ”

Nine sets of angry eyes snapped to him. Sam’s mouth went dry and his heart skipped several beats. If he’d had any doubts that Raksura and Fell were both dangerous and inhuman, their predatory stares would have erased them. Standing in the middle of a pack of starving vampires while unarmed and bleeding would have been less terrifying.

He faced Malachite and forced the words out anyway: “They’re trying to help. If all you do is doubt them, how can they ever learn to be better? Why not give them a chance to prove what they can do?”

Dimly he was aware that Dean was staring at him in horror, that the other Raksuras’ expressions ranged from horrified to incredulous to, in Stone’s case, impressed. Malachite didn’t move, but something in the air changed, and for an instant Sam felt a pressure against his mind as her strange power turned on him in full. She was growling, low enough to vibrate Sam’s bones, and her lips had drawn back to reveal razor-sharp fangs. The hairs on the back of Sam’s neck stood up straight, a primal terror running through his body, and he almost turned, almost cowered—

( _archangels towering over him, Lucifer and Michael united in their hatred of the human who’d trapped them here_ )

—but as terrifying as Malachite was, she wasn’t the Devil. Sam gritted his teeth and squared his shoulders. Made himself say, “Let them help. Stop second-guessing them, stop treating them like—” The Raksuran language didn’t have a word for _bomb_. “Like they could crack at any second and start killing things. Let them be what you hope they _can_ be, not what you fear they _might_ be.”

For a long terrifying moment, nobody moved; Sam didn’t think his heart was even beating. Then Lithe stepped forward. She was far too short to actually hide Sam from Malachite, but at least she was in her line of sight. “He’s right,” Lithe said gently. She moved closer to Malachite, reached out and wrapped a hand around Malachite’s claws. “If I can be Raksuran, then so can they.”

Malachite shifted, her dark eyes leaving Sam to fix on Lithe. The weight of her attention lifting was a physical relief, but Sam held himself steady and kept the relief off his face - he couldn’t afford to show any weakness just then.

He said to Malachite, “When I was a baby, a demon claimed me. My father’s last words to my brother were instructions to either save me or kill me. Dean chose to save me.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Even years later, it was hard to talk about, but he couldn’t stay silent in the face of First’s frustration. “You chose to save Consolation’s flight, to give them the same chance my brother gave me. But they can’t _do_ anything with it if you’re always ready to jump on them for so much as breathing.”

“They were working as hard as the Arbora to find a way here,” Jade added. Malachite’s stare turned to her and Jade’s spines lifted slightly before steadying. She continued, “I don’t like them being around my consort, either, but I do believe they know better than to touch him again.”

Moon came forward next, tension in his shoulders but a sardonic expression on his face. “As the consort in question,” he said dryly, “I can take care of myself. Let First help. The faster we find Consolation, the sooner we all go home and I don’t have to be around any of them anymore.”

Malachite turned her stare on Moon. He bared his teeth at her, and abruptly Sam understood why Moon had been so careful to keep his teeth hidden when he smiled: the expression on his face right now was a predator’s challenge, nothing pleasant at all. Malachite held his gaze for a moment longer, then looked away. Her spines relaxed and her tail went still, that horrible predatory emptiness vanishing, a person returning to fill the void. The entire room seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Either not noticing it, or more likely ignoring it, Malachite threw an annoyed glare at Stone. He responded with the same teeth-baring gesture Moon had used. “Don’t give me that look,” Stone said. “He’s _your_ bloodline.”

Moon snorted. To Sam, he said, “You argue like a mentor.”

_Mentor_ seemed to be the closest word Raksuran had to _witch_ or _mage_ , but the translation spell gave it connotations of _wise_ and _seer_ , as well _._ Sam decided to take it as a compliment. “Thanks.”

Moon’s eyes crinkled in a smile. Sam had the odd feeling that he’d won points in a game he hadn’t realized he was playing - that Moon and Malachite, and by extension the other Raksura, saw him differently, or held him in a higher regard, now. Which could only be a good thing, in the long run.

Ignoring them all, Malachite turned and strode out of the motel room to the parking lot. Moon sighed, but followed, with Jade, Chime, and Rise close behind. First hesitated, staring at Sam as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened - couldn’t believe someone had stood up for him. Sam flashed him a tired smile, careful to keep his teeth hidden.

After a moment, First smiled back. Then he slipped out into the empty parking lot and vanished around the side of the building. A moment later Sam heard the flapping of scaled wings as the Raksura took off to search for the Leviathan’s ship.


	7. Chapter 7

Several hours later, Sam was ready to strangle Lithe and Merit. Or at least forbid them from asking any more questions. He’d already had to explain how the Internet worked, complete with diagrams sketched on the backs of papers taken from World Curios’ headquarters, which had in turn led to a discussion about electricity which his decade-old college classes had left him woefully unprepared for. Stone hadn’t bothered to intervene, sinking down to sit against the wall with his eyes closed, apparently dozing, while Kethel stayed quiet and withdrawn in his corner.

“Hey,” Sam said, forestalling yet another question from Merit. “How about you two go outside with Dean and he’ll show you how the car engine works?” _Car_ came out in English, since the Raksuran language didn’t have a word for it, and he added, “The… carriage we came here in.”

That earned him a glare from Dean, who’d been dozing on the bed, but excited exclamations from the Raksura. Sam knew Dean wouldn’t stay annoyed for long; if there was anything he loved it was showing off the Impala. He rolled off the bed and led Lithe and Merit outside, already fielding questions.

Which left Sam with peace and quiet, finally.

He sank down in the desk chair and rubbed his temples. Lithe and Merit were nice enough, but their endless curiosity was difficult to endure.

“Arbora,” Stone said, making Sam jump. Glancing over, he saw Stone hadn’t opened his eyes, but one corner of his mouth quirked up in an ironic smile. “They're endlessly curious, and they'll talk your ear off.”

Sam hesitated. On the one hand, this wasn't the first time someone had referred to Lithe and Merit as Arbora, and Sam wanted to know what it meant. He'd noticed that they apparently couldn't fly - Merit’s scaled form hadn't even had wings - but otherwise they seemed to be Raksura.

On the other hand, after answering the Arbora’s questions for the last several hours, Sam wasn't sure he was up for asking any of his own.

He settled for, “Once this is over, I want to ask you guys so many questions.”

Stone snorted. “Once this is over, we’re going back to the Reaches.”

“...yeah,” Sam agreed. Stone said nothing else, and the room lapsed into blissful quiet.

Sam flipped the laptop open, browsing absently through World Curios’ files, but nothing else jumped out at him that might be either the strange soft black thing Malachite had seen, or anything else related to whatever ritual Leviathan planned to perform to turn Consolation into their leader.

Turning his attention to the missing persons reports, Sam tried to spot anything that might hint about the nature of the ritual, or which might confirm or refute their guess that it would happen tonight. Now that he knew what to look for, it was pretty easy to make sense of the disappearances: the World Curios employees to shuttle the limestone relic, the woman who’d made and paid for the order. The captain of a lake barge and a handful of dock and port workers to help him steal it without attracting attention, though Sam couldn't help but wonder about the other crew of the freighter - if they were involved, and simply hadn't been reported missing, or if they were unaware their captain had been replaced by a man-eating primordial monster. The butcher had probably provided food for the Leviathan, or had been one of the group clearly chosen to perform manual labor. The blacksmith would have been for making the cage Moon had described, and the other laborers probably assigned as bodyguards, bullyboys, or movers.

_And everyone still missing is long since Leviathan food,_ Sam thought ruefully.

He was just pulling up the police report of the warehouse crime scene when the door of the motel room swung open and Dean stuck his head inside. “We're gonna go grab some food,” he announced. “You guys want anything?”

Sam raised an eyebrow at him. “You're taking the Arbora?”

Dean shrugged. “They want to see what it's like to ride in the Impala. I figure, two birds, right?”

“Sure,” Sam agreed. If Dean hadn't gotten sick of them yet, Sam was happy to let him keep dealing with them. “I'll take a salad.”

“Of course you will,” Dean said, and rolled his eyes.

“Does this city have any kind of fried dough?” Stone asked. He’d opened his eyes, the most interested he’d been since he arrived.

Dean grinned. “A man after my own heart. You want doughnuts? Churros? Cannoli—Actually, you wanna just come with? We can do a Midwest fried dough tour.”

Stone glanced over at Kethel, sitting silent in the corner. “Just pick out something good.”

“Sure.” Dean looked at Kethel as well. “What about you?”

Kethel shook his head.

“You sure?” Dean asked.

Stone raised an eyebrow at Kethel and said, “You’ve had nothing but a few roots and travel breads for five days. Are you sure?”

Kethel growled low, not dangerous exactly but a clear warning not to press the issue.

Dean shrugged. “Have it your way,” he said, and disappeared back out the door. A minute later the Impala’s engine rumbled to life, sounding oddly high-pitched compared to Kethel’s earthquake growl, and gravel crunched as the car pulled away.

Sam said to Kethel, “You’re not going to eat?”

Kethel fixed him with a dark stare. “I eat when Consolation is safe.”

“Leviathan’s not going to give her up without a fight,” Sam pointed out. “It’s hard to fight on an empty stomach.”

Kethel bared his blunted teeth, that same challenging expression Moon had used earlier. “If I eat,” he said, “they leave me behind.”

“There was… a great deal of debate,” Stone said dryly. “The territory around the platform where the portal opened has been hunted mostly clear by Opal Night Arbora, so any grasseater herds big enough to feed a kethel are half a day’s flight away. Some of the Arbora didn’t realize how well Kethel can hear, and suggested trying to open the portal when he left to hunt.”

“Ah.” Sam scrubbed a hand over his mouth. No wonder Kethel was worried about being left behind. Carefully, Sam said to Kethel, “You don’t have to hunt here. We can bring food to you.”

Kethel barked out a sound that, after a moment, Sam realized was supposed to be a laugh. It was hoarse and strange, like he wasn’t used to laughing much, or maybe whatever it was that made him Fell instead of Raksura meant his body didn’t easily allow for laughter. But his eyes glittered with grim amusement as he said, “I do not eat groundling food.”

“Can’t, or don’t?” Sam asked.

“Does it matter?”

Sam blinked. “Uh.”

Kethel made a sort of shrugging gesture, not quite the one Moon used, but which seemed to have the same dismissive meaning. “When Consolation is safe and we return to the Reaches, I will eat my fill of grasseaters.”

Sam nodded, ceding the point. It wasn’t as though he could force Kethel to eat - he’d have to trust him to know his own limits. Besides, they still had to find Leviathan and Consolation. After that, once they had a better idea what they’d be going up against, they could make sure they were fully prepared. Until then, there wasn’t any sense in borrowing trouble.

For a few minutes, the motel room was silent: Stone dozing against the wall, Kethel staring into the distance, Sam absently browsing the web on the laptop. Then Kethel said quietly, “You stood up to Malachite.” Startled, Sam looked up at him. Kethel hesitated, then asked, “Why?”

Sam’s turn to hesitate. Stone’s eyes had opened, but he hadn’t otherwise moved; Sam suspected he wanted to hear the answer, too. Though Sam wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. Finally he tried, “I guess… I know what it’s like to do something - to _be_ something - everyone thinks makes you… makes you _evil_ , I guess.”

Kethel tilted his head, a question. Sam sighed, aware Stone was listening, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “It’s, uh… it’s kind of a long story…”

“I like stories,” Kethel said. He sat up straighter, clearly settling in to listen.

It was unexpected enough that Sam huffed out a laugh. “I—All right, fine. So, I told you my father told my brother to kill me...”

In a way, it was easier to tell the whole thing like that - pretending it was just a story, something that had happened to someone else. He had to back up a few times to explain things, like demonic possession and how that affected the blood of the host, but eventually managed to get the whole thing out: Mary Winchester née Campbell’s deal with Azazel, what Azazel had done to Sam as an infant. Years later, learning about his powers and how drinking demon blood - the blood of humans possessed by demons - helped. What he’d done in the name of stopping the Apocalypse, the demons - and their human hosts - he’d killed.

What it had cost him, in the end, and he didn’t realize he was digging his thumb into his palm hard enough to bruise, until Kethel reached over with one big hand and pried Sam’s hands apart. His skin was surprisingly warm and his fingers, though callused, were gentle. Kethel said softly, almost a question, “It was hard.”

Sam nodded. “What I did, I did because I thought I was helping people,” he said. His voice hitched and he swallowed. “I thought it was the only way to help people. But I think… I think I knew it was wrong, too. And even after I stopped, I…” He closed his eyes, remembering the craving, the screaming cramping feeling of _need_. “Giving up something like that... yeah, it was hard.” He shrugged, trying for a casualness he didn’t remotely feel.

Kethel watched him. There was an intelligence in his dark eyes that was easy to overlook for his orcish build, his awkward words. Sam swallowed a few times, took a deep breath until he felt steady again. He doubted Kethel was asking just because he was interested in Sam’s past. Sam ran through the conversations he’d had with the Raksura and the Fell so far, and realized abruptly why Kethel wanted to know. He said carefully, “How long ago did you start following Consolation?”

Kethel looked away, and Sam knew he’d hit the mark. He waited, aware of Stone sitting silent against the other wall, but Stone didn’t seem inclined to jump in. Finally Kethel said, “She is young. We only follow her for a few turns yet. Before that...” His shoulders moved in that gesture which seemed to be the Raksuran equivalent of a shrug.

Sam nodded. It was disconcerting to think Kethel had been actively eating innocent people not that long ago - _turns_ seemed to translate, more or less, to _years_. But then, a few years ago, Sam had been drinking demons.

Stone snorted, startling both Sam and Kethel, and they turned to stare at him. He said to Sam, “You were trying to save people.” To Kethel: “You didn’t know any better.”

Kethel rumbled deep in his chest, and met Sam’s eyes. “We know now,” he said.

* * *

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Moon glanced uneasily toward the huge bank of roiling clouds approaching rapidly from the east. He’d hated thunderstorms since one had nearly killed him as a fledgling, and this one was far too close for comfort. Already the wind had driven the waters of the lake into white-tipped waves that tossed the ship below them like a leaf.

They’d been circling it for a while now, trying to determine through the splashing waves whether it was the one stolen by Leviathan. The wind was blowing too hard for even Malachite to get a scent from it, but as best Moon could tell, the paint design and bridge configuration were the same as the one Sam had showed them earlier. And this particular patch of lake was well away from both shores, and nowhere near the paths the other ships were following through the water.

Movement on the deck caught his eye, and he squinted. A groundling had just stepped out from beneath an overhang along the front of the multi-story bridge that took up the entire rear of the ship. He held one of the Leviathan's long, slender shooting weapons in his hands, though it was pointed at the deck and he didn’t appear to be on alert. The groundling looked around, surveying the empty water around the ship, then tossed a glance up toward the sky.

Moon tensed, but they were flying high enough that they must have looked like nothing more than birds to the groundling, because after a moment he ducked back under the overhang, vanishing from sight. That answered that, at least - this had to be the ship Leviathan had stolen, which meant Consolation was on board somewhere.

Moon flapped his wings to get within shouting distance of Jade, who flew a little ways ahead near Malachite. “What do you want to do?” he called. “Go back for the others?”

Jade glanced at him, but before she could answer Malachite folded her wings and plunged down toward the boat. Jade hissed in irritation. “Apparently we’re going to rescue Consolation,” she said, and dropped after Malachite. Moon followed her, with Rise, Chime, and First close behind.

By the time they landed on the deck, the roar and splash of the waves muffling the sounds of their claws on the metal surface, Malachite had ripped the groundling’s head off and thrown its shooting weapon into the lake. She threw the head in as well, though it seemed to be more out of habit considering Leviathan seemed to be able to pull its groundling bodies back together over almost any distance, given enough time. Shaking black blood off her claws, she flicked a spine at Rise to stand watch.

Moon looked around the deck as Rise spread her wings and leaped up to the top of the bridge. The ship was easily three times as long as the Golden Islanders’ wind-ships, with the huge bridge looming over the rear and a much smaller one situated at the very front. In between was a series of broad flat hatch covers which presumably covered the ship’s cargo hold - or holds, if each hatch led to a separate hold. There were hinges on the ends of the hatches, each as big as a small table, along with rails that would steer the huge doors as they rose in upward fan-folds. Thick pipes ran the length of the deck beside the hatches, and a low railing surrounded the edges.

Malachite studied the bridge, then turned away and bounded across the deck, stopping at each hatch, mouth open to taste the air. At the sixth one she went still, a tension to her body and spines that told Moon she’d found Consolation and Leviathan. He bounded over to join her, keeping his wings close to his back to avoid getting caught by the winds buffeting the ship, with Jade and Chime on his heels and First a cautious distance back.

“How do we get inside?” Chime whispered, barely audible over the wind and the waves. Thunder rolled in the distance and Moon shivered.

Malachite tilted her head, studying the hatch as though it were a misbehaving warrior. But even the Terror of the Reaches couldn’t scare a metal door into doing what she wanted. Jade said to Chime, “Go see if you can get inside the bridge. There have to be controls for them somewhere.” She hesitated, then added, “Moon, go with him. There are probably more Leviathan guards.”

Moon deliberately ignored the way Malachite’s tail lashed. He knew Malachite didn’t especially like that Jade didn’t treat him like a normal consort - but Malachite also knew Moon _wasn’t_ a normal consort. And she knew Moon wouldn’t accept any queen who tried to treat him like one. He turned and spread his wings, catching the wind and letting it carry him up to circle the top level of the rear bridge, where clear glass windows looked out over the deck. Chime followed, still unsteady in the gusts but much better than he’d been even a turn ago.

A narrow balcony ringed the back three sides of the bridge, and Moon caught the railing and pulled himself over. He grabbed Chime’s arm as Chime landed on the rail, steadying him until he’d dropped to the floor. They found a door set into the wall; it swung open at Chime’s touch and they slipped inside.

The sudden silence as the door closed out the roar of the wind was deafening. Moon’s spines twitched and he forced them down. They stood in a long, narrow, low-ceilinged control room lit by the bright white bulbs this reality used everywhere. Counters lined the walls beneath the windows and stretched across the middle of the floor, covered in knobs and dials and levers and blinking lights Moon couldn’t begin to comprehend. Chairs sat in front of some of the counters, and boxes with glowing crystal panels hung from the ceiling. The back wall was lined with metal boxes and cabinets jutting out at odd angles, making it impossible to tell if any doors led off it. The place stank of unwashed groundling and lake wrack and Leviathan.

Chime hissed in consernation. “What are we supposed to do with all of these?”

Moon had been thinking exactly the same thing. “Start pushing buttons?” he suggested. Chime hissed again, this time in exasperation, but moved forward anyway, running his claws lightly over the nearest counter and the dials studding it. Moon went the other way, easing along the back wall of the room. The room was too crowded, too cramped, to easily see if anyone else was in here, but his skin was prickling under his scales.

The only warning Moon had was the faint scuff of a boot sole against the metal floor. A deafening noise rang through the room, and Chime cried out and collapsed against the counter. A groundling - a Leviathan - stepped out from between a pair of cabinets in the wall at the far end of the room; belatedly Moon realized there was a narrow door tucked between them. Moon snarled and gathered himself to leap, but the Levaithan pointed his shooting weapon at Chime, who lay gasping on the floor.

“Move and I kill him,” the Leviathan said.

Moon snarled again. He didn’t have a clear path to the Leviathan around the counters and boxes and chairs, but the Leviathan had a clear shot to Chime. The man eased forward, keeping one of the counters between himself and Moon, and pulled a small device from his pocket. Holding it up to his mouth without taking his eyes off Moon or his weapon off Chime, he said to the device, “I’ve got two in the bridge and three more on deck.”

Dropping the device back in his pocket, he crouched beside Chime. Chime had shifted to groundling from the shock of the injury, and blood spread in a pool beneath him. The man grabbed him by the arm and stood, hauling Chime up with him, heedless of Chime’s cry of pain at the movement. Blood ran in rivulets from a small hole in his back just beneath his ribs, and he staggered when the man set him on his feet.

Moon’s claws itched with the urge to leap at the man and eviscerate him, but he held the shooting weapon pressed to the side of Chime’s head and Moon didn’t dare move. The man caught Moon’s eye and jerked his head toward the door. “Out. Take the stairs down to the deck and walk outside.”

It wasn’t as though Moon had a choice. He did as the man instructed, his nerves screaming when the narrow door and the even narrower hall beyond forced Moon to turn his back on him or risk fouling his wings on the many sharp metal things studding the walls. Chime whimpered in pain as the man dragged him along, his footsteps shuffling and uneven, but at least he was still standing. Moon had no idea what the shooting weapon had done to him, but if the weapon was anything like the projectile weapons used by the Aventerans, it had probably gone straight through his scales to shred the flesh beneath. He needed to get to a mentor, and soon.

Finally they reached the deck. Moon stepped out from under the overhang into the wind, and saw Jade notice him and straighten from where she was crouched beside the hatch with First. Then her spines stiffened and he knew the Leviathan had emerged behind him, still with the shooting weapon pointed at Chime.

“Get over there,” the man said to Moon, indicating Jade and First with another jerk of his chin. Moon hesitated and the man’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Now!” he spat.

Moon went. From this position, he could see Rise perched at the top of the bridge, watching them with wide eyes, but the man was still under the overhang and Rise could neither see him nor jump him - at least, not before he shot Chime.

The man let go of Chime, though he kept the weapon trained on him, and pulled another small box out of a pocket. His thumb moved over the little box, pushing several buttons; a moment later the hatch in front of him began to open. The big metal door screeched as it wheeled along the track, folding up against itself to reveal a hold half-full of a fine yellowish powder. The Leviathan gestured with the hand holding the box. “Get in.”

Jade’s spines rose higher and she bared her teeth at him. The man was speaking the groundlings’ language and Jade couldn’t understand him, though the gesture was clear enough. Moon said, “Jade—”

Jade hissed at him, a warning. The Leviathan tensed and jabbed the box toward the hold again. “Get in!”

Then Moon remembered Malachite had been out here.

The man’s body jerked, the weapon going off with a deafening _crack_ as Malachite ripped his arm clean off. He dove to the side, rolling away from her, his face distorting into the needle-toothed Leviathan jaw and his remaining arm already reaching under his jacket, probably for another weapon. Moon and Jade leaped forward together, Moon going to Chime while Jade and Malachite pounced on the Leviathan and Rise dove from the bridge to join them.

Moon was just crouching beside Chime to lift him up when something slammed into him from behind, hard enough to send him flying. Heat and sound washed over him and he had a heartbeat to realize something had exploded, then he crashed head-first into the metal wall of the bridge and everything went dark.


	8. Chapter 8

“Here, try one of these,” Dean said. He tossed a grease-stained paper bag at Stone, who caught it and looked inside. “They’re Greek. Loo-ko-maids, or something.”

“Loukoumades,” Sam corrected around a mouthful of salad.

“Yeah, those things,” Dean said easily. “There’s a honey dip in there, too,” he added to Stone.

Dean and the Arbora had returned from their food-hunting expedition with bags from half a dozen restaurants and two entire boxes of coffee. Every flat surface in the motel room was covered with paper trays, cups, and wrappers. It turned out Raksura didn’t cook their meat, so Lithe and Merit had poked cautiously at a bag containing four hamburgers and a pulled pork sandwich before giving in and chowing down, while Stone and Dean were bonding over Dean’s fried dough haul.

While they ate, Sam turned the tables on the Arbora by asking them what being Arbora meant, which led to them happily explaining the complex Raksuran caste system around cautious bites of hamburger. He didn’t think they’d noticed, but Kethel was listening intently as well. Lithe was in the middle of detailing the complicated intertwined bloodlines of her court, Opal Night, when first Stone, then everyone except the Winchesters abruptly stopped eating and looked up toward the ceiling.

Sam froze with a forkful of salad halfway to his mouth. “What is it?”

“Someone’s here,” Stone said. All of them were turning now, like a pack of hunting cats, their heads following the path of whoever it was down off the roof, around the side of the building, and toward the motel room’s door. Merit jumped up and opened the door just as First ran up to it, the bare skin of his torso sheened with sweat. He was clearly out of breath and shaken, and dropped down on the nearest bed as though his legs had given out. 

“First!” Lithe said, and darted to his side. “What happened?”

“They were captured,” First panted. “Malachite and the others—The Leviathan blew them up and captured them.”

“What?!” Merit yelped, and Lithe clapped her hands over her mouth in horror.

Stone dropped his food on the table and caught Merit by the shoulders, easing him aside so Stone could crouch in front of First. “Tell us exactly what happened,” he ordered.

First shook himself, then took several deep breaths. “We found the ship,” he said. “Northeast of the city, in a big patch of open water away from the other ships’ paths.”

“And they just attacked it?” Stone growled. “Without coming back for us? —Never mind,” he added before First could answer. “Moon and his reckless mad birthqueen were both there, of course they did.” 

“You said Leviathan’s on it?” Dean asked.

First nodded. “Malachite smelled them inside one of the holds.”

“They have Consolation?” Kethel demanded, then flinched when every Raksura turned to look at him.

But First just nodded again. “Malachite smelled her, too. The consort and Chime went inside to see if they could open the hold. But they got caught. A Leviathan shot Chime with a projectile weapon. When the queens attacked the Leviathan, he set off an explosive device. It knocked them all out.”

“Even Malachite?” Lithe asked, appalled.

“She was right on top of it,” First confirmed miserably. Stone growled in annoyance, apparently less concerned than the others about Malachite’s well-being. First added, “I don’t think they were dead, but I couldn’t do anything to help - more Leviathan with projectile weapons came out of another hold after the explosion, and one of them saw me and they started shooting at me.”

Stone stopped growling long enough to say, “You did the right thing coming back.”

Lithe reached around him to press a cup of coffee into First’s hands. “Drink this,” she said. First took the cup gratefully, and as he drank, Lithe said to Stone, “What do we do, line-grandfather?”

“We go kill the Leviathan,” Stone said, as though it were both obvious and trivial, “and rescue those idiots.” 

“It ain’t that easy,” Dean interrupted. “Leviathan can’t be killed by any weapon we have. Only way we know to do it is the stupid stick that sent me to Purgatory, and we don’t exactly have time to make more of those.”

“Moon said you said they can kill each other,” Stone countered. “How do they do that?”

“They eat each other,” Sam said. “Or themselves, which is _not_ something you want to see, believe me.” The memory of the doctor who’d been “bibbed” by Dick Roman still cropped up in his nightmares on occasion.

“But we got no way to convince them to start snacking on each other,” Dean said. “So, no, we don’t have a way to kill them.”

“Then we’ll figure something out,” Stone said firmly. “Right now, they have our people. We’re going to get them back.”

Sam glanced around the room, doing a quick mental tally. First apparently had wings, as evidenced by his going with the others on the scouting mission, but the Arbora didn’t. Moon had said earlier that Kethel being a kethel meant he couldn’t fly for some reason, and Stone had stayed behind when the winged Raksura went to search for the ship, suggesting he couldn’t fly either. And Sam and Dean, of course, were human. “We’ll need to steal a boat,” he said.

“What for?” Merit asked.

“What do you mean, what for?” Dean said. He’d apparently come to the same conclusion as Sam, and now jerked a thumb at First. “None of you can fly except him.” 

Kethel did that deep barking laugh, and looked past Sam at Stone. “We fly,” he said.

“Just not in the middle of groundlings,” Stone agreed. He stood up. “Get whatever you want to bring.”

“Wait, hold on—” Dean said, but everyone ignored him. The Raksura exploded into motion and Sam joined them - whatever Stone and Kethel meant, Sam wasn’t about to be left behind. He grabbed the duffel bag full of weapons and did a quick scan through it to make sure it held both the borax squirt guns and their refill bottles. Lithe grabbed her satchel, and Merit handed First another cup of coffee, which he gulped hastily.

Stone said to Kethel, “I’ll carry the Arbora. Can you take the groundlings?”

Kethel nodded, then looked to Sam. “You don’t mind?”

“It’s fine,” Sam said, though he wasn’t sure how Kethel planned to carry both him and Dean. Even if he did have a winged form like the Raksura, the spines on his back would prevent them riding piggyback. And while he was built like a football tackle and might have the upper body strength to dangle one Winchester from either hand, Sam didn’t think either he or Dean could tolerate being hung by the wrists for that long. He’d just have to hope the Raksura knew what they were doing.

“Wait, hang on, time out,” Dean interrupted. He pushed in between Sam and Kethel. “We are _not_ flying out to that ship.”

“Why not?” Sam asked. “If the Leviathan have captured Moon and the others, we need to get out there fast. Flying’s a hell of a lot faster than finding a ship and stealing it.”

Dean glared at him, but there was something off about his expression, something almost… afraid? Abruptly Sam remembered years ago, their first encounter with a demon, Dean reluctantly admitting he was terrified of flying. “Oh,” Sam said.

“‘Oh’,” Dean mocked him, though now Sam recognized the belligerance as a mask for fear. “Yeah, no, we’re not _flying_ anywhere.”

“ _We_ are,” Stone said. “You can stay behind if you want.” Without waiting for a response, he strode over to the door, the Arbora and First in his wake.

Dean glared at his back, then turned back to Sam, pleading. “Come on, Sammy—”

“He’s right,” Sam said. “You’ll be fine.” 

“I won’t drop you,” Kethel added. “We go now.”

Sam caught Dean by the arm and dragged him, still sputtering, out of the motel room and around the corner of the building to the small side parking lot. It was hardly private - they were surrounded by taller buildings whose windows looked down on the lot - but the street out front was empty and the rapidly approaching storm meant most people were probably bunkering down inside rather than peering out windows.

Stone stood a few feet away, head tilted as he eyed the stormclouds. “We’ll have to move fast,” he said. “We don’t have much time until the rain starts.”

“The wind is already almost too bad to fly through,” First admitted. “I can do it again if I have to, but maybe not much longer.”

Stone nodded. “Let’s go.” Then he shifted.

Sam had seen Moon and Malachite’s dragon forms up close, had seen Rise and Chime and Jade and Merit’s dragon forms back at the warehouse. None of them had prepared him for what Stone became. His body blurred and expanded into a deep black mass of shadows some thirty feet tall. Unlike the other Raksura, the blur didn’t fade after the moment of the shift - his form stayed amorphous, impossible to focus on. Sam had an impression of sinuous movements of a long tail, a mane of spines rising behind his head, a broad chest to support razor-edged wings the size of parasails.

“Holy _shit!_ ” Dean yelped, and jumped backward, one hand moving toward his gun before he caught himself.

Sam just stared. “So, uh, this is why you didn’t want to shift before,” he managed finally.

Stone made a low rumbling sound of amusement. He reached huge hands, fingers tipped with gnarled claws, toward Merit and Lithe, and the Arbora shifted and climbed into Stone’s palms. Sam had seen Merit’s shifted form, but this was the first time Lithe had shifted in front of him; her dragon form looked more or less the same as Merit’s except her scales were the same black as Moon’s and Stone’s. Stone cradled them against his chest, letting them hook their claws into the bony ridges near his collarbone, then crouched and leaped into the air. The downdraft from his wings staggered Sam back several steps, and Dean grabbed onto him to keep from falling.

“Christ,” Dean muttered. “No, Sam, no way, this is _nuts—”_

“The kethel carry us all the time,” First said helpfully. “You’ll be fine.”

Dean glared at him, but Kethel was already stepping into the open space Stone had just vacated. When he shifted, it wasn’t like the Raksura: his form didn’t blur, but rather melted upward, flowing into a shape equally as massive as Stone’s but far less nebulous. Kethel’s shifted form was black, too, but in place of scales he had thick armor plates along his arms, shoulders, and back. Where the Raksura all had a mane of spines and frills, he had a massive halo of horns around his head. His jaw was oddly long, exposing a double row of fangs, and his wings were webbed and had fewer joints than the Raksura’s.

First shifted as well, revealing his own dragon form to be a smaller version of Kethel’s with the same black hide and armor plating, long jaw and doubled fangs. He jumped into the air, flapping hard against a gust of wind, and took off after Stone.

Kethel looked down at Sam and Dean, and rumbled a question low in his chest. Sam took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Let’s do this.” In truth, the idea of being picked up by a thirty-foot-tall dragon creature and carried across Lake Erie was terrifying - but Kethel might read any hesitation as fear of him being Fell rather than of flying, and Sam didn’t want to do that to him. So he made himself stand steady as Kethel wrapped one enormous hand carefully around him and lifted him up against his chest.

“Sam…” Dean protested weakly. He already looked sick.

“It’s fine,” Sam assured him. He touched Kethel’s chest carefully; Kethel didn’t have the same bony ridges as Stone but Sam found he could settle the duffel bag across his lap and hook his fingers into the edges of the armored plates. “It’ll be fun,” he called down to Dean. “Nothing like flying in an airplane.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dean shot back.

“Look,” Sam said, “we don’t have time, and the longer we stand here the more likely someone will notice us.”

Kethel rumbled in agreement, the sound vibrating Sam’s bones. Dean shifted from foot to foot, then finally shook his head. “Fine,” he muttered, almost too low to hear over the wind. “Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Dean regretted ever having left Purgatory. The place had been awful, but it was nothing compared to being carried over a freezing-cold lake through a looming thunderstorm by a thirty-foot-tall dragon man. He was cold to his bones, the wind cutting straight through his jacket and flannel shirt, and his hands were cramped from clinging to Kethel’s armor plates. At least Sam looked equally miserable, with his shoulders hunched up around his ears and his long hair whipping across his face.

Stone had led them in a wide loop out to the west; apparently he was trying to avoid the worst of the approaching storm while still following First’s directions to the ship. The wind was still enough to cause problems for First - a strong gust had knocked him head over heels and he’d plummeted halfway to the water before managing to right himself. But though thunder rumbled too close for comfort and Dean could make out the front edge of the rainfall as they swept back east toward the ship, the storm hadn't hit them yet.

Sam kicked Dean's leg to get his attention, shouting over the rushing wind, “I just thought of something. First said the Leviathan had guns.”

Dean frowned. That was a good point. Above them, Kethel's head cocked; he'd probably heard Sam. Dean called up to him, “If you're this much bigger, are you that much tougher, too?”

He couldn't hear Kethel's deep growl in response, but felt it vibrate his bones, and the big head moved in an ambiguous sideways motion which Dean suspected meant Kethel wasn't sure of the relative toughness of his armored hide versus a standard handgun. “That woulda been too easy,” Dean muttered. Raising his voice so Sam could hear, he called, “You brought the borax, right?”

Sam nodded and tapped the duffel in his lap. Dean held out a hand for one. “We'll have to come in shooting, then.”

As Sam pulled out one of the squirt guns and passed it to Dean, Kethel rumbled again and flapped his wings a few times to pull up even with Stone. First flew closer, as well, though he couldn't get too near without risking being destabilized by the bigger dragons’ wings. Taking the hint, Dean shouted the plan over to Stone and the Arbora, then down to First. Stone's spines moved when Dean finished, hard to see within the amorphous blur of his massive form, but apparently some kind of signal. First dropped back and Stone and Kethel pulled ahead, powerful wings cutting the air.

Dean had thought they were going terrifyingly fast before, but apparently Stone and Kethel had been holding back so First could keep up. Now they shot forward, moving so fast Dean had to duck his head behind his arms to keep the wind from freezing his eyeballs. In just a minute or two - to Dean’s eternal gratitude since he didn’t think either his skin or his stomach could take much more of this flying thing - Kethel rumbled and Dean squinted against the wind to see the big lake freighter _Kaministiqua_ being tossed around in the waves below.

Stone flapped again, somehow putting on even _more_ speed to sweep ahead in a wide arc. Following his path, Dean realized abruptly that the rain from the storm was approaching the front of the boat - and Stone was timing his own approach to swoop in with it. Below, tiny figures ran around the deck of the ship, pointing frantically as they spotted Stone at the forefront of the curtain of rain. Stone stooped on the front of the ship, a terrifying black blur of fangs and claws and razor-sharp wings - and let loose a roar that rattled Dean’s eardrums even up in the sky on the other side.

Leviathan screamed in terror and broke formation, some of them tripping over themselves in a panic trying to run away and others frantically swinging their guns up and firing in Stone’s general direction. Kethel folded his wings and dove, and Dean was pretty sure he’d left his stomach back up in the clouds somewhere but he didn’t have time to care because they were coming up _fast_ on the deck full of panicked Leviathan. Stone pulled up sharply at the last second over the rear bridge and Kethel swooped in beneath him, and from their spots in his hands Dean and Sam let loose with the borax guns all over the Leviathan.

They crossed the length of the ship in an instant, leaving screaming, writhing Leviathan in their wake. Dean lost track of Stone for a minute as Kethel wheeled into a tight turn; G-forces slammed him against Kethel’s chest and it took everything Dean had not to puke. But he managed to keep his stomach down, and Kethel spun in to land on the side of the ship. His weight sent the freighter rocking even harder in the waves and he all but dropped Dean and Sam on the deck, then shifted down to his humanoid form in time to throat-punch a Leviathan charging at them.

Dean let the borax gun drop on its strap around his shoulder and drew his Purgatory blade, hacking the head off the nearest Leviathan. The ship rocked again as Stone landed with the Arbora, then the rain hit with a deafening crash of thunder and for a minute or two everything was the pure chaos of fighting and killing.

When it was over, Dean stood back to back with Sam on top of one of the hatches, their blades black with Leviathan blood and half a dozen bodies scattered around, the rain washing away pools of black blood. Kethel didn’t have a trophy pile but had been throwing Leviathan bodily toward Dean and Sam to be hacked apart. Lithe and Merit had six more bodies between them, which Stone scooped up in his massive claws and hurled overboard before doing the same for Sam and Dean’s pile.

Then Stone shifted to his human form and scowled. “That won’t keep them away for long.”

“And it wasn’t all of them,” Sam added, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the rain on the deck. “There were at least twenty-five that we know of.”

“They’re down here,” Merit called, pointing to the hatch at the front of the ship. “And whatever ritual they’re doing, they’ve already started it.”

Dean swore, then jumped as something black flew at him from over the water. But it was just First. He pointed at the hatch at the other end of the ship, next to the bridge. “I think that’s where they put Malachite and the others,” he called.

Sam elbowed Dean. “We need to find the control room,” he said. “Get those hatches—”

Stone shifted back to his huge form, sunk his claws under the edge of the hatch cover, and yanked. Metal groaned and hydraulics screeched, the ship rocking precariously with the effort. Kethel ran along the deck to the other side of the hatch, shifted, and threw his own strength into forcing the cover up. Something gave with an ear-splitting _crack_ and the cover folded upward along its hinges.

* * *

Moon paced back and forth along the mound of… whatever it was that covered the bottom quarter or so of the hold. He thought it might be some kind of pulverized stone, from the scent and taste of the dust in the air, but couldn't see to be sure. And the exact nature of the contents of the hold weren’t important right now. What was important was that Chime wasn’t in here with them.

He’d come to, ears ringing and back stinging from the heat and force of the blast, in the pitch black of what he assumed was the hold the Leviathan had tried to force him and the queens into. He’d found Jade, Malachite, and Rise quickly despite the darkness; they were dazed and bruised from the explosion going off directly beneath them, but didn’t seem to be seriously injured. But they were the only ones in the hold. Chime was nowhere to be found, and Moon couldn’t stop thinking about what Dean had said yesterday about Leviathan eating groundlings just like Fell.

Malachite had spent some time uselessly shoving and clawing at the hatch cover trapping them, but the ship was made of solid metal and without any way to get leverage, even a queen’s strength was no match for the cover. Moon, Jade, and Rise had been coming up with increasingly desperate ideas for escape when they’d heard Stone roar.

Listening to the muffled noises of the fight outside, feeling the ship rock from more than just the waves, had been torture. So when the sounds had stopped and something started to rip off the hatch cover, they were more than ready to burst out the moment there was a gap.

Moon breathed a sigh of relief when he landed on the deck and saw Stone and Merit and the others, unharmed. Merit ran up to them and gave Moon and Jade a critical once-over. Moon said, “We’re fine. Have you found Chime yet?”

“No,” Merit said, and glanced around worriedly as though they'd somehow overlooked him. “We thought he was with you.”

Moon shook his head. “He's hurt, I don't know what they did with him—”

“Probably have him in there,” Dean interrupted, jerking his head at the hatches on the other end of the ship. He and Sam had pulled some clear bottles from their big bag and were refilling the tanks of their water weapons. “Doing a ritual's hard work, they probably wanted a snack.” Sam elbowed him hard in the side and glared; Stone hissed at him. Dean protested, “What?”

Moon spun away, feeling his spines rattle with tension. Jade squeezed his wrist and said, “Stone, Kethel, can you open the other hatch?”

Stone snorted. As he and Kethel moved into position, First said, “Why haven't they come out and attacked us yet? They have to know we're here.”

“Merit said they've already started the ritual,” Sam pointed out. “The ones we took out already might have been all they could spare.” He snapped his weapon back together and hefted it.

Stone and Kethel grabbed the hatch cover and heaved. It groaned and gave, folding upward slowly. Kethel let go as it began to move, shifting back to groundling and sitting down abruptly, leaving Stone to shove the cover to the side. Over the wind and the rain, voices spilled out of the hatch, raised in a frantic chant. Moon lunged for the hatch - and froze.

The Leviathan had been busy: they'd knocked out the walls between this hatch and the ones to either side, creating a much larger space. They'd laid flat boards across the curved bottom of the space to make a floor, and painted the boards with a complex pattern of symbols which put the ritual circle back at the warehouse to shame.

At the center of the circle, Consolation sat in the barred iron cage. Her eyes were open but heavy-lidded, unseeing, and she swayed with the motion of the ship as if she was still drugged. Chime lay curled unconscious in front of the cage, his bronze skin ashen and blood pooling beneath him.

Surrounding the cage were the remaining thirteen Leviathan, all chanting together in a bizarrely liquid, hissing language Moon didn’t recognize. One of them, standing directly in front of Consolation, held something small and black cradled in his hands. Even as Moon watched, he raised his hands, offering the black thing to her. Consolation hissed weakly at it, her spines twitching as though she was fighting to flare them. Their chant was building up to a crescendo, screaming over the rain, and Moon gathered himself to leap on the one in front.

Then the black thing shot out of the Leviathan’s hands through the bars of the cage and slammed into Consolation’s chest.


	9. Chapter 9

Consolation howled in pain, falling backward and clawing at the black thing on her chest, but it burrowed straight into her flesh, nearly a finger-width deep in an instant. Thin black tendrils, barely visible against her black scales, threaded outward from the thing along her skin like— _Like veins_ , Moon realized, horrified, even as the stone began to pulse. To _beat._ The soft black stone wasn’t a stone at all—it was a heart.

“Accept us,” the Leviathan who’d held the heart called, his voice passionate - almost rapturous. “Accept us into you, as we accept you into us!”

Consolation snarled at him, but the heart seemed impervious to her claws, its tendrils spreading along her chest and shoulders. The Leviathan motioned to Chime’s limp body in front of the cage and said, “We have prepared an offering for you. Join us, and feast!”

“Let her go!” Sam shouted from the other side of the hatch. He stood with his borax gun pointed down at the ring of Leviathan, Dean beside him.

The Leviathan who’d held the heart cackled. “You’re too late, Winchesters,” he called up to them. “The heart has accepted its new body. Soon it will merge completely with her, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. As long as we live, it lives. Our new queen will—”

Malachite ripped his head off, then turned and slammed the two nearest Leviathan into the wall of the hatch. She leaped on the next group and Jade and Rise dove past Moon to join her, just as Merit called, “Moon! They’re coming back!”

Moon spun around. Sure enough, as waves crashed over the ship’s railing, the water turned black and left behind gooey smears that melted upward into the shape of Leviathan. Stone batted two of them right back into the water and Merit and Dean attacked a third, but already more waves were bringing more of the Leviathan they’d killed earlier back onto the deck. The ones in the hold not currently being torn apart by Malachite had opened up with their shooting weapons, the thunder of the weapons in the enclosed metal hatch nearly enough to drown out the thunder of the storm overhead.

A projectile pinged past Moon and he dodged away from the hatch opening, only to have to dodge again when one of the Leviathan returning from the water shot at him before Sam sprayed it with borax. On the other side of the deck, Kethel sat slumped against the rail, even paler than normal while First stood protectively over him. Malachite flew out of the hold and landed near Moon, snarling. Blood dripped down her wings where they’d been pierced by projectiles, and more blood streaked her arm from a long gash on her shoulder. Leviathan swarmed after her, hideous hungry mouths open and howling.

“Any ideas?” Moon asked her.

“We kill them,” Malachite spat, and flung herself at the Leviathan again.

But that was the problem - they couldn’t kill them. No matter how many times they ripped each Leviathan apart and flung them in the lake, the damn things would just put themselves back together and ride the waves back onto the boat. And even if they simply grabbed Consolation and fled… she’d already been infected with the Leviathan heart. They didn’t know what to do about that, either.

Down in the hold, Consolation shrieked in pain or fear or both as the heart’s tendrils burrowed deeper into her body. Moon hissed in frustration. They didn’t know how to stop the Leviathan, and they were running out of time to find the answer.

* * *

Sam ducked under a sweep of Stone’s tail that sent four Leviathan flying off the ship, fired the last of his borax solution at a fifth, and skidded up to Moon. “We can’t keep doing this,” he panted. “They just need to hold us off for however long it takes for that heart to take over Consolation completely.”

“I _know_ that,” Moon snarled. “But they said we can’t stop the heart unless we kill them!”

Sam blew out a breath of frustration. “And we don’t know how to kill them. It’s not like we have any way to make them eat each other.”

“If we took Consolation and left,” Moon said, “we’d at least not have them attacking us—”

Sam shook his head. “No time. At the rate that heart’s going…”

Moon hissed. “It might be all we can do.” He glanced over at Kethel, scaled brow furrowing. “What’s wrong with him? If we have to carry him, too—”

“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. He led the way across the deck, fighting the wind and the lashing rain, to where Kethel leaned heavily against the railing. First snarled and half lashed at them before recognizing them, then subsided uneasily. Sam said, “Is he all right?”

“Hunger cramps,” First explained.

A Leviathan ran up to them and Sam shot it in the face, then Merit leaped on it from behind, tearing its throat open. As Merit flung the body overboard, Moon snarled in exasperation, “ _Why_ does Kethel have hunger cramps? Didn’t you eat?”

Kethel glared up at him and bared his blunted fangs. “If I leave to hunt in the Reaches, the Raksura leave me behind when the portal opens. If I eat the groundling food here, it brings on the hunger sooner for being not enough.”

Moon looked away, hissing and lashing his tail; Sam took that to mean the explanation was reasonable if frustrating. And based on what Moon and Stone had said about Fell eating people, it was probably better for Kethel to exercise restraint—

Wait.

A horrible idea flashed through Sam’s mind and he stared at Kethel despite himself. An instant later he realized Moon was staring at him, and Moon demanded, “What?”

Then Moon followed Sam’s gaze to Kethel and Sam saw it when he made the same connection as Sam. He whipped back to Sam, all his spines flaring and his tail lashing sharply. “ _No_ ,” he said, horrified.

Sam shook his head. “No,” he agreed. “There has to be another way.”

“What?” First demanded. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” Sam said.

“A bad idea,” Moon said at the same time. He shook his head, clearly making an effort to settle his spines, though it didn’t work well. “We’re not doing it.”

First looked between them, frowning in bafflement. Merit, beside him, had gone still and wide-eyed; Sam suspected he’d figured it out too. Then Kethel said, his voice barely audible over the roar of the thunder and the rain and the waves, “Tell him.”

“No,” Sam said, too quickly, and First glared at him. Ignoring First, Sam said to Kethel, “No, we’re not going to ask you—”

“ _Tell him_ ,” Kethel said again, sharper, with a growl to the words that vibrated the deck under Sam’s feet.

Moon looked at Sam, his spines making a complicated motion Sam couldn’t begin to interpret, his expression one of raw dismay. But Sam remembered a cloudy day in Bobby’s house, telling the two people he cared most about in the world what he’d have to do to stop Lucifer. So he said to First, “Leviathan can only be killed by _being eaten._ And the Fell eat people.”

First stared at him for a long second, his eyes wide with horror, while behind him Merit threw a Leviathan overboard and Dean shot yet another one that was aiming its own gun at Sam. Then First hissed in dismay. “She’s dying,” he whispered. “It’s taking over her and she’s dying. If she dies…”

“I know,” Kethel said. He hooked an arm over the railing he was leaning on and hauled himself shakily to his feet. “If she dies, it doesn’t matter what I eat or don’t eat.”

“No!” Sam protested. “You can’t—”

“We have to kill them,” Kethel said levelly. “I have to choose me or our whole flight…” He shook his head. “No choice.”

“We’ll figure something else out,” Moon insisted.

Kethel eyed him. “Your queen made this choice.”

Moon growled. “This is _nothing_ like the situation with the Hians—”

“No?” Kethel bared his teeth back. “One consort for all the Reaches. One kethel for all the flight, and all this world. No choice.”

Moon hissed in frustration and turned away. Sam had no idea what they were talking about but it was clearly enough to stop Moon from arguing. He thought again about that last night before he’d said _yes_ to the Devil, and looked up at Kethel, his heart aching.

Malachite appeared beside them so suddenly First and Merit both hopped backward. She said to Kethel, deliberately, “You would do this for your queen? You would break your vow, knowing the consequences?”

Kethel met her eyes for a long silent moment. Down in the hold, Consolation screamed, and Kethel twitched. “Without Consolation,” he said, “I would have no vow to break.”

Malachite’s tail lashed once, slowly. Lightning cracked and thunder boomed, but her words were clearly audible: “If you wish to honor your vow, I will respect that decision. But if you wish to save your queen, this once, I will not hold your actions against you.”

Kethel bared his fangs again, then tilted his head at Merit. “A mentor witnesses,” he said. “Do you give your word?”

Merit snapped to attention, his eyes on Malachite; Sam guessed that a mentor bearing witness to something held some kind of binding weight. Malachite said, “As the mentor witnesses, I give my word that I will not hold your actions against you or your flight.”

“Witnessed,” Merit said solemnly.

The word was barely out of his mouth before Kethel was moving, flowing upward into his massive dragon form. A dark arm lashed out, snatched a Leviathan off the deck, and shoved it whole into Kethel’s long jaw. There was an ugly crunch of bone, an aborted scream, and the Leviathan was gone.

Kethel ate three more before the Leviathan realized what was going on. They broke ranks, screaming in sudden horror, firing wildly at Kethel or lunging at him with gaping needle-toothed jaws, trying to tear him apart. But Malachite, Jade, First, and the other Raksura pounced on them, restraining them until Kethel could swallow them. A few Leviathan tried to escape by jumping overboard, but Rise and Moon and Stone dove after them, fishing them out of the water and hauling them back to be eaten.

Sam kept a tally as Kethel ate. There had been twenty-five Leviathan, as far as they knew: twenty-five people who’d vanished and returned two weeks ago. They’d fought twelve when they first landed on the ship, and another thirteen had performed the ritual in the hold. Kethel ate them all, voracious, and Sam abruptly understood why the Fell were so hated and feared in Moon’s world. Sam had seen a lot of terrifying things in his years as a hunter, knew that humans weren’t the top of the food chain as they liked to think. But a thirty-foot-tall black dragon swallowing humanoids whole shone a chilling new light on just how far down the chain they were.

Moon dropped from the air beside Sam, tossing a struggling Leviathan to Jade to pass to Kethel. He shook his spines to rid them of the lake water, though with the rain still pouring down it didn’t make much of a difference. Looking up at Kethel, he said grimly, “I never thought I’d be bringing groundlings to a kethel to be eaten.”

Sam snorted, remembering Ruby, remembering working with Meg and Crowley to bring down Dick last year. “I know how you feel.”

Moon’s spines flicked in a gesture that seemed to be tired resignation. “It’s working, at least.”

“Thank God,” Sam agreed. “When we realized they were back…” He trailed off, remembering the terror of a year ago, being on the run, losing people ( _Dean_ ) one by one, fearing they’d finally come up against an enemy they couldn’t fight. He dug his thumb into the scar on his palm; saw Moon notice and made himself let go.

“Where the hell’s he _putting_ them?” Dean demanded. He’d come up behind them, his Purgatory blade propped casually against his shoulder, his jacket streaked with rain-thinned black Leviathan blood. The Arbora trailed behind him; all the Leviathan had been cleared from the deck and there wasn’t much for them to do. Dean added to Moon, “I know you said you ate a whole goddamn cow, but this is ridiculous.”

“Polar bears’ stomachs can hold up to twenty percent of their body mass,” Sam pointed out absently.

Dean stared at him. “Why do you _know_ that?”

“Raksura - and Fell - are as much magic as we are physical,” Merit said to Dean, sparing Sam from having to answer. “Shifting takes a lot of energy. So does flying. Major kethel have always been known for having voracious appetites. And Kethel hasn’t eaten for days.”

Above them, Kethel swallowed yet another Leviathan. He seemed to be slowing down, but there were only a few Leviathan left, being hauled back by Stone and Malachite from where they’d tried to escape by swimming in the lake. Sam counted again: twenty-three, twenty-four… Kethel bit the last one in half, swallowed both pieces, and burped.

“That’s all of them,” Sam called up to him. “I think.”

First dove down into the hold where Consolation was still trapped in the cage. Sam, Moon, and the others followed, Moon grabbing Sam around the waist and Jade scooping up Dean despite his yelp of protest. Moon dropped Sam on the wooden planks and went straight to Chime, still lying motionless on the floor in front of the cage. A glance told Sam Chime was still breathing, at least, so he turned his attention to Consolation.

The black Leviathan heart embedded in her chest had spread its tendrils out as far as her wrists and knees, but even as Sam watched the tendrils began to recede. Black ooze slithered under her scales, drawing back up into the heart, leaving thin silvery scars in its wake. Consolation leaned against the bars, panting, and First reached through to grip her wrists. Kethel, back in his humanoid form, dropped into the hold beside First with a thump that rattled the wooden planks making up the floor. Consolation looked up at him over First’s head and bared her teeth. “It wants me,” she hissed.

“It can’t have you,” Kethel answered firmly.

“No,” Consolation agreed. “It can’t.”

Then she dug her claws into her own chest around the heart, ripped it loose, and bit it in half.


	10. Chapter 10

Several hours later, back in the motel room in Cleveland, Sam leaned tiredly against Dean’s leg and surveyed the packed room.

They’d left the lake freighter behind as quickly as possible after the battle. Chime was injured and Consolation was still woozy from drugs and almost being absorbed by a Leviathan heart, and nobody wanted to stay on the rain-lashed, wave-tossed ship. A cursory search had turned up the big limestone block tucked in a corner of the hold, and they’d confiscated it since a relic capable of opening portals to other realities was too dangerous to leave lying around, but otherwise the freighter had appeared empty. Sam was all too glad to leave the logistics of recovering it to Detective Carmichael.

They'd flown through the last distant rumbles of the thunderstorm to get back to the motel. Now, Moon, Jade, and Merit were tangled together on one of the two beds, asleep, with Chime half-buried under them. He’d lost a lot of blood, but the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital. Sam had helped Merit bandage it, and Merit had put Chime into something called a “healing sleep” which seemed to be a sort of magic coma. Malachite had taken over the other bed, with Rise and Lithe curled up beside her. Stone sat on the floor between the beds, with his back to the one where Moon and the others slept.

The half-Fell had retreated to the room’s far corner, away from the Raksura. Kethel sat with his back against the wall and Consolation curled like a cat in his lap, with First tucked beside them. Consolation had managed to fly back from the ship under her own power, but collapsed as soon as she stepped into the motel room; Lithe had declared it exhaustion and the aftereffects of whatever she’d been drugged with and advised Kethel and First to let her sleep it off.

Dean had taken the room’s only chair, so Sam had ended up on the floor next to him. He was exhausted too, but too keyed up from the fight to go to sleep. He didn’t think Malachite or Stone were asleep, either, but nobody was talking, and with the rain drumming gently on the roof, the room felt peaceful.

Then Dean ruined it by saying quietly, “Think they’re gone for good this time?”

Sam didn’t need to ask who he meant. “I hope so.”

Several of the Raksura stirred at the words, but nobody sat up. They were speaking English, which only Moon could understand, so they didn’t need to worry about being overheard. Dean said, “You should get some sleep.”

“I’m fine,” Sam said.

Dean snorted, but didn’t press the issue. “So what now?” he asked instead. “Send all these guys home when they wake up?”

“I guess,” Sam said. “I mean, there’s no reason for them to stay here.”

“Yeah.” Dean shifted, the leg Sam wasn’t leaning on beginning to bounce restlessly. “Too bad. I was starting to get used to them.”

It was Sam’s turn to snort. “You mean, get used to hot dragon ladies walking around naked.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed dreamily.

“You’re gross.”

“What?” Dean demanded. “Can’t I admire a gorgeous woman when I see one?”

Sam rolled his eyes and didn’t answer. Honestly, he was mostly glad that Dean had ended up on the “ogling the hot woman” side of things rather than the “freaking out that they were working with monsters” side; considering where he’d been for the past year Sam wouldn’t have been surprised.

Dean yawned, then twisted so he could lean his head on his hand on the desk, his eyes drifting closed. Sam waited until Dean had nodded off, then eased to his feet and crossed to where Kethel sat with Consolation and First. Kethel stirred as Sam slid down the wall to sit beside him; Sam’s guess that Kethel wasn’t sleeping either had been right. Across the room Malachite’s eyes slitted open, and at some point Stone had started watching them, but neither of them moved, so Sam ignored them both.

“You doing all right?” he asked Kethel softly.

Kethel grunted.

Sam tipped his head back against the wall and waited. It wasn’t like they had privacy in the little motel room, not with Malachite and Stone listening, and he didn’t want to drag things too far into the open. But he didn’t want to leave Kethel alone with what he’d done on the ship, either.

Finally Kethel said, “It is nothing I did not do before.” He looked down at Consolation sleeping in his lap, fondness clear on his face. “It is worth it, for her.”

Sam nodded. “That’s what’s important. If you did the right thing, then that’s what matters.”

Kethel studied him for a while in silence. Across the room, Stone closed his eyes and leaned back against the bed. Malachite still watched them, her face expressionless and her spines flat. Aware, but not angry, not that deadly void of before. She’d accepted what Kethel had chosen to do, just as Dean and Bobby had accepted Sam’s choice to trap Lucifer. Sam just hoped she could live with it better than Dean had.

Kethel was still watching him, so Sam cleared his throat and said, “Anyway. What you did today, you saved a lot of people. Not just Consolation, but everyone in Cleveland. Probably the whole country, if Leviathan had succeeded. So, uh. Thank you.”

For a long, long minute Kethel said nothing, just stared at Sam with his head still tilted and clear surprise in his dark eyes. Sam couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had ever thanked Kethel before, if Kethel had suspected - feared - that Malachite would kill him for eating the Leviathan despite her witnessed promise. Finally Kethel grunted and looked away. One big hand smoothed absently through Consolation’s frills. Very softly, he said, “Thank you. For telling me.”

Sam smiled and let his head fall back against the wall again. He didn’t remember falling asleep.

* * *

Some time later, Sam woke to a stiff neck and a vague sense of confusion about why he’d fallen asleep on the floor in front of the television with Riot on his lap and Amelia’s leg slung over his shoulder. He blinked his eyes open and memory hit: he’d left Amelia and Riot a month ago when Dean turned up alive and well, and now they were in a motel in Cleveland with a gaggle of dragon-people from an alternate reality. Sam wasn’t leaning on the couch, he was tucked against Kethel’s side under his arm, and it wasn’t Riot in his lap but Consolation’s legs draped across him and her tail wound around his calf.

Early-morning sunlight slanted through the thin motel curtains; they must have slept the night away. Dean was still passed out on the desk, but Moon and Jade were pushing themselves upright, which was what had woken Sam. Both of them were focused on Chime, who was struggling to sit up.

Merit, already wide awake, said to Chime, “Lie back down. You aren’t nearly healed yet.”

“I’m fine,” Chime snapped.

Jade thumped him back down to the bed with long-practiced ease. “He said lie down.”

Chime hissed in frustration. Moon hissed back, though the sound managed to be somehow fond.

All the noise and movement was enough to wake the others, Rise and Lithe both sitting up sleepily, First uncurling from Kethel’s other side. Malachite didn’t move, but her eyes were open, and Stone stretched against the edge of the bed, yawning.

Dean startled awake hard enough to nearly fall out of the chair. “Whazza—?”

“Chime’s a stubborn idiot,” Moon informed him.

Dean stared at him for a second, then blinked owlishly around the room, clearly trying to wake up enough to make sense of that. Sam managed to disentangle himself from Kethel and Consolation before Dean spotted him. Sleeping next to other people was a comfort Sam hadn’t been with Amelia long enough to take for granted, but he doubted Dean would understand. Pushing himself to his feet, Sam stretched, his spine popping.

Consolation sat up in Kethel’s lap, rubbing at her eyes and yawning like a child. Sam saw the exact moment she woke up enough to remember what had happened: her spines snapped out and her tail lashed sharply as her eyes widened. First caught her wrist, and Kethel wrapped one big arm around her. “We found you,” he rumbled. “We rescued you.”

Consolation shuddered. “I remember.” She shook herself, smoothing her spines with a visible effort, then looked across the room at Malachite. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

Malachite said nothing, but Consolation didn’t seem to be expecting an answer. She climbed to her feet, still a little wobbly but clearly much more aware and alert than she’d been yesterday, and First steadied her. “Where are we?” she asked. Her gaze settled on first Sam, then Dean with curiosity.

“It’s a long story,” First told her.

“One we’ll tell back in the Reaches,” Jade added. She looked down at Chime, then at Merit. “Is it safe for him to travel?”

“If someone carries him,” Merit said. Chime glared at him, but didn’t object.

Jade traded a glance with Malachite, then looked over at Sam and Dean. “Then we should go,” she said. “We’re grateful for your hospitality, but it’s time we returned to our courts.”

“We understand,” Sam said. “We’ll take you back to the warehouse. Uh,” he added, remembering. “Do you think you can open the portal from this side?”

Merit looked thoughtful. “Probably? Auburn is waiting on the other side, and a few other Opal Night mentors. And we have the stone block the Leviathan used. We’ll figure it out.”

Sam nodded. They’d figured out how to get here; they could probably get back just fine. He said to Kethel, First, and Stone, “You guys want to ride with us again?”

Kethel rumbled agreement. Stone looked at Dean. “Would you mind if we got some more of those fried dough balls with honey on the way?”

Dean grinned. “Deal.”

* * *

The detour to the restaurant meant the others had arrived at the warehouse long before the Impala and her passengers, and Moon stood near the door looking impatient while Dean parked. He perked up when Stone tossed a wrapped gyro at him. “What’s this?”

“Breakfast,” Stone said.

Moon sniffed the wrapper, then tore it open eagerly. Stone passed out more gyros to the others as he entered the warehouse. Sam made sure Chime ended up with two; Chime had lost a lot of blood and while Sam had no idea how quickly Raksura normally healed, getting food in him would probably help a lot. They ate sitting on the floor around the rune circle while Merit and Lithe discussed how to make it work again, with Chime interjecting here and there from where he sat propped between Moon and Jade. The main issue was that the portal seemed to be one-way: all the Raksura described the sensation of travel as being sucked down. Which meant they couldn’t simply do as Malachite had done yesterday, since they needed to go up and back to the Reaches.

Sam managed to stay out of it up until Moon told them Sam was the one who’d fixed the runes. Half an hour of intense discussion of magical theory later, Sam’s head was spinning and his throat hurt from talking in the growling Raksuran language, but they had a working plan. It was a bizarre combination of what Sam remembered of the spell Balthazar had used when he’d sent them to a different alternate reality, some things Lithe and Chime remembered from a place they referred to as ‘the foundation builders’ flying city’, and the runes already painted in blood on the ground, all leaning on the limestone block from the Foundation Stone as a focus. But Sam thought it had at least half a shot at working.

With the plan in place, it didn’t take long for them to sketch out the modifications to the Leviathans’ spell circle in a mixture of Sam’s and Merit’s blood while Dean and Stone retrieved the block from the Impala's trunk. Finally Sam stepped back, stretching out a kink in his spine from bending over the cement floor, and surveyed the circle. “I think that’s it,” he said.

Lithe nodded. “We’ll know for sure when we try it.”

Malachite stepped forward, into the center of the circle. “Then try it,” she said.

“We all have to go at once,” Merit said. “It’s going to take an enormous amount of power to open the portal in the other direction. We don’t want anyone to get left behind.”

Jade flicked a spine at the others, and they piled into the circle, Moon carrying Chime in his arms. Jade hesitated before stepping in herself, turning to where Sam stood with Dean beside him outside the circle. “Thank you,” she said formally. “For all you’ve done for us.”

Sam inclined his head to her. “Thank you as well. Without all of you, we wouldn’t have been able to stop Leviathan.” He made sure to meet Kethel’s eyes as he said it. Kethel looked down, then back up, his shoulders squaring. Sam added, “We, uh, probably won’t ever see you guys again, so, uh.”

Dean stepped forward, clapping Sam on the shoulder. “What my brother’s trying to say is, take care. It’s been fun.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. The corners of Kethel’s eyes crinkled, and First actually smiled.

Jade smiled, too. “Take care of yourselves, as well.”

She looked at Merit, who crouched with Lithe at the edge of the circle, placing their hands on the block. Sam felt the hum of the Arbora’s magic as they pushed it into the runes and through - a call, a signal for the Raksura mentors on the other side. For a long moment nothing happened, then a faint pulse of foreign magic flickered through the runes. Merit and Lithe took a deep breath together, their power surging. Then the floor swirled open beneath their feet and the entire group plummeted through, vanishing into a swirling vortex.

Wind lashed Sam’s face, and beside him Dean staggered, grabbing Sam’s arm for balance. The world seemed to wobble for a moment, and when it steadied again, the circle was empty.

The Raksura had gone home.

* * *

The first thing Moon sensed was the warm wet scent of the Reaches after a rain. He opened his eyes and nearly collapsed with relief when he saw the familiar green of the mountain-trees, the wide platform where they’d landed to argue with Consolation’s flight days ago. Auburn, the Opal Night mentor, stood nearby with a group of his court’s warriors and Arbora, as well as the rest of the Indigo Cloud Raksura who’d been visiting Opal Night. Someone shouted in pure relief, and for a while the platform was chaos as everyone greeted everyone else. Moon was so happy to be home - or at least back in the Reaches - that he barely flinched when a swarm of dakti and a kethel plunged down from another platform nearby: Consolation’s flight, greeting her and Kethel and First.

Eventually everyone calmed down enough for Jade to break away from the Indigo Cloud group and cross the platform to where Malachite stood with her warriors and Arbora. Malachite watched her approach, then turned to Consolation, who waited at the edge of the platform, surrounded by her dakti with Kethel and the other kethel flanking her. Malachite said, “Come here.”

Consolation hesitated, but Kethel nudged her and after a heartbeat to settle her spines, Consolation crossed the platform to join the queens. She carefully didn’t look over to where Moon stood in the middle of the Indigo Cloud group, though from the tense set of her spines, Moon had no doubt she was acutely aware of his presence. She said, “We just want to go home. We didn’t…” She broke off, shaking her head, her spines lifting nervously before she got them under control again. “Are you still mad at us?”

“No,” Malachite said, then looked down at Jade.

Jade smiled wryly. “After all that… I just want to go home, too.” She caught Consolation’s gaze, abruptly serious. “But if you ever come near my consort again—”

“We won’t,” Consolation promised immediately.

“Good.” Jade stepped back, her spines rippling in satisfaction.

Consolation looked at Malachite, then, when Malachite said nothing, turned to her flight. “Let’s go, everyone.”

The half-Fell flight took off immediately, the dakti flapping into the air, the kethel dropping over the edge of the platform to shift in midair and catch the wind on the way down. Consolation moved to join them, then hesitated, looking back over her shoulder at Malachite and Jade. “Thank you,” she said. “For not leaving me there.” Without waiting for a response, she dove after her flight.

“We should go, too,” Jade said to Malachite.

Malachite didn’t answer her directly, but looked past her at Moon. Moon knew his birthqueen well enough by now to understand what she was asking; he said, “She’s right. Our clutch is waiting for us.” It was both reassurance that he still wanted to stay with Indigo Cloud, and a reminder that he did occasionally act like a normal consort.

He thought Malachite smiled, ever so slightly, as she turned back to Jade. “Then go,” she said. “We’ll expect you back at the next turn of the seasons.”

There would normally be more formalities when a visiting party from an allied court left, but they’d done all that days ago, before everything had gone wrong, so Jade just nodded to Malachite. Moon picked up Chime again and joined her at the edge of the platform. The wind blew from the east, carrying with it the familiar scents of the Reaches. He spread his wings and caught the air. With Jade in front of him, Chime in his arms, and the others around him, he turned toward home.


	11. Chapter 11

**Epilogue**

“You promised me a pretty pink bow, Agents,” Detective Carmichael said. 

“Sorry,” Dean said, though even he could tell he didn’t sound very sincere. “It was kinda complicated.”

“Twenty-nine people vanishing without explanation is _complicated_ ,” Carmichael shot back. “You telling me they’re all part of some kind of Satanic suicide cult that stole a goddamn freighter and dove into Lake Erie during a thunderstorm is a freaking _dumpster fire_.”

“At least you know what happened?” Sam offered weakly, then caught Dean’s eye and grimaced. Dean made a face back. It wasn’t the best cover story they’d ever come up with, but explaining why the twenty-nine missing people were gone for good and a stolen lake freighter was currently drifting around Lake Erie without a crew, _without_ mentioning Leviathan or Raksura or thirty-foot-tall flying Kethel people-eaters, was a hell of a tall order.

They stood in Carmichael’s cluttered office, Dean and Sam in the Fed monkey suits, Carmichael with the forgotten remains of Chinese take-out on his desk and an expression that said he was developing a massive headache. Dean was about to make an excuse to leave - they’d told Carmichael about the freighter, which was the only loose end left to deal with - when Carmichael sighed and looked up at them. “Okay, _Dean and Sam Winchester_ ,” he said pointedly. “How about you tell me what _really_ happened?”

Dean froze, peripherally aware of Sam likewise stiffening. Carmichael watched their reactions with grim amusement. “I knew I recognized you,” he said to Dean. “Took me a while to remember, but it was some ten, twelve years ago. Weird case where three whole families died after moving into the same house in the course of a year. Freaky deaths, some real _Exorcist_ shit nobody could explain. You showed up with a guy my partner ID’d as notorious criminal John Winchester, asked some weird questions, broke into the house, desecrated a grave, and booked it before we could bring you in. But the deaths in that house stopped.”

Sam glanced at Dean and raised an eyebrow. Dean shook his head; he vaguely remembered the hunt, but Sam had been at Stanford at the time. Carmichael said, “The FBI has no Agents Sambora or Sabo, I checked. And they definitely didn’t send anyone out to look into our little missing persons non-case.”

“Ah,” Sam said, then stopped, visibly uncertain how to continue.

Dean tried, “Well, I’m honored to be recognized, but really, we should be going, you guys have a freighter to catch—” He started to back toward the door as he spoke, but Carmichael held up a hand.

“I’m not going to arrest you,” he said. “Legally, you two are dead. I just…” He sighed. “Whatever the hell this was, is it… is it like the last time you were here?” 

Dean traded a glance with Sam. “Uh, more or less,” he admitted.

Carmichael nodded, like that was the answer he’d expected. “Is it over?”

“Yeah,” Sam answered.

The confidence in his voice must have been enough for Carmichael, because the detective nodded again. “Well… good. I’m not gonna ask what the hell it was about—”

“Don’t,” Dean interjected. “You’ll be happier.”

Carmichael snorted. “I don’t know about that. But as long as it’s over, I don’t really care.”

“It’s over,” Sam promised. He offered a hand for Carmichael to shake, which Dean thought was a ballsy move considering. Carmichael seemed to think so, too, because his eyebrows shot up - but then he grasped Sam’s hand and shook. Sam added, “Thanks, Detective. Good luck.”

“And if weird shit does turn back up,” Dean added on impulse, “give us a call. The number on the card’s good.” He tossed a mock salute as he headed out the door, Sam on his heels.

“See?” he said to Sam as they left the police station. “What we do, it’s good. People need us out here. Hunting,” he added pointedly, as if he didn’t know Sam knew exactly what he was talking about.

Sam shrugged, making a non-committal noise. Dean paused at the Impala’s door. “Sammy,” he said. “This is what we do. These people—” He gestured out at the city in general, the bustling traffic around the station. “They need us. Detective Carmichael back there knew it. You know it, too.”

“They need you,” Sam said softly. He leaned on the roof of the car, not meeting Dean’s eyes.

“Us,” Dean corrected. “We’re a team, little brother. Just… don’t go falling off any more towers, okay? You aren’t always gonna have a dragon around to save your ass.”

He swung into the car while Sam snorted. They weren’t okay yet, not while Sam still wanted to escape the hunting life, not while Dean had to remember Cas falling at the portal out of Purgatory. But this? The two of them in the Impala, on the road, killing the things that went bump in the night? 

This was home.

*** END ***


End file.
